Dear Mr. Finance Minister, I am a Doctor having my private practice. Last year you had given a big relief to people like us in increasing the self assessment limit to Rs.60 lakhs. This has relieved us from a lot of record keeping and fees to auditors. Thank you for this kind gesture.
Loans for Business Development
Sir, as a self-employed professional the one major problem that I face is for favorable treatment of my clinic for loans. The banks are ready to give me personal loans and mortgage loans. Banks are telling me that since clinics such as mine are not classified as industry, they are not eligible for certain loans.
Sir, there are several other professionals like me who also need to invest a lot on machinery some of them are energy inspectors, broken cable detection specialists, engineering designers, architects, etc. So please consider this plea to be not only from doctors but from all other self-employed professionals.
A proper business loan for doctors will help us to expand our service from being a single person operation like a clinic into a proper hospital.
Duty Anomaly for Equipment
Sir, I have seen that many of the Indian made medical equipments are equal in cost or are costlier than the equivalent imported ones. My discussions with some suppliers revealed that this anomaly is because of higher duty for Indian manufacturers when compared to the import duty for imports.
Please consider giving better support to Indian manufacturers of medical equipments. This will help the manufacturers in India and support us as users of these equipments. This will also benefit the patients.
Medical Insurance Regulation
Sir, though not directly related to you, I wish to bring to your notice the wrong practice of certain hospitals and doctors of claiming much higher bills when a patient says that he/she has medical insurance. This has lead to disgruntled insurance companies refusing to settle claims.
This again has lead to a lot of inconvenience to patients and genuine doctors alike. Kindly see if some regulation can be brought in this regard.
Income Tax Slabs
Sir, please consider increasing the income tax slabs. Last year and the year before, you had given some nominal increase in the slabs. But they were not in tune with the inflation. So we are in reality being taxed at a much higher rate than 2 years ago.
As self- employed professionals our income growth is not keeping pace with the rise in inflation and the tax rates. This has affected our standard of living. Though we can make things run for a few years without much changes. I am very worried about the long term. We need your understanding, help and support in this regard.