Federal Minister for Finance and Economic Affairs Senator Ishaq Dar on Friday hinted at important development regarding small and medium enterprises (SMEs) sector.
The minister gave a clue while responding to a query from a reporter about the future of SMEs during the inauguration of Centre for Excellence in Islami Finance at Institute of Business Administration (IBA).
The minister said that the government was also committed to widen the tax net by making the non-filers as filer ones. The issue of withholding tax on non-filers would also be resolved at the earliest, he said.
On this occasion, the minister emphasised the commercial banks to expedite their efforts for the conversion of the conventional banking into Islamic banking. For this, he continued, there was a great business for Islamic banking in the micro-financing, SMEs and agriculture sectors of the country. The real business for the banks was in these sectors, he said.
“Our first priority is Islamic banking. Being Muslims, our ultimate goal should be riba-free economy,” he remarked.
He also repeated his resolve that more important steps would be taken to include more population into financial system as at present only 13 percent people were linked to banking system. The government had already taken important and targeted steps on this account.
About the promotion of Islamic banking, the target for next two or three years was the conversion of the conventional business into the Islamic banking up to 30 percent of total banking, he said. “At present, this share was 12 percent. The government had already taken many steps in this regard.”
The commercial banks should at least open windows for the Islamic banking, he asserted. He said Islamic banking had become very attractive to the world and they take maximum share in the global Islamic banking business.
He expressed his satisfaction that as announced by him in his budget speech of 2014-15, three centres for excellence in Islamic banking had been set up in the country and hoped that these centres would contribute a lot for building manpower for Islamic banking in the country.
The minister said that the present government had succeeded in achieving more than five percentage annual growth of gross domestic product (GDP). The target for next two years was seven percentage GDP, he said.
He said SMEs were the backbone of an economy and they must strengthen this sector. In Japan, SMEs had 75 percent share in their economy, he added.
Dar said after the revival of economy, the next target for the government was maximum economic growth and more employment generation in the country over the coming two years period.
For achieving this target, he added, the government had focused on energy sector and up to March 2018, 10,000 MW would be injected into the system. There were also other projects in pipeline to generate another 14,000 MW electricity from different sources.
“We are working for beyond our tenure,” he said. Governor, State Bank of Pakistan, Ashraf Mehmood Wathra, said the setting up of these centres for excellence in Islamic banking was not an easy task. Two centers were already inaugurated in Lahore and Peshawar recently, he said.
Former governor SBP and director IBA, Dr Ishrat Hussain, also spoke of the importance of the centre and highlighted the role of IBA in manpower building.
