Reacting to demands by many on taxing services including leading industry chamber Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), Dabur India chairman VC Burman stoutly decried any such move while Crompton Greaves' chairman KK Nohria advocated this move to increase revenue generation.

"Services, which now contribute upto 50 per cent of the GDP must be brought into the tax net. This will require registration of service providers and the government will need political will to overcome resistance from various quarters," Mr Nohria said here.

Mr Burman, however, said taxing services was not the best of solutions for increasing revenue. "Experience has shown that this service tax gets passed on to the consumer which puts him, not the service provider, into disadvantageous position."

He said the issue should be seen from the Income Tax perspective instead and TDS should be deducted on all the income of the services sector.

On his part, Escorts Ltd chairman Rajan Nanda said the services sector should be brought in line with the VAT, as has been done by most developed countries.

But while Mr Burman opposed this move to tax services, he agreed with the rest and said reduction in corporate taxes would encourage corporates to increase their investments in the country. Reacting to reports of continuation of surcharge, Mr Nohria said Income Tax rates along with surcharge have been inching up every year. "The rates of tax, per se, are at acceptable levels, but surcharges have been added for one reason or another over the last few Budgets. At this point in time, we do not require any increase in the exemption limit".

On yet another hot issue of dumping by neighbouring China, Dabur's Burman said there was an urgent need to study anti-dumping laws of other countries and that the government needed to indentify industries being affected by dumping and then take case-by-case decisions.

Industry leaders also spoke in unison on the issue of providing them with a level playing field, specially since import barriers are slated to go down from April 1 this year.

While they advocated no special treatment to the domestic industry in terms of protection from imports, they said excise duty structure should also be accordingly aligned and rationalised.

Escorts' Nanda said reduction of import tariffs on capital goods should be staggered since this sector is highly competitive and the WTO agreement in this regard needs to be kept in mind.

Industry leaders were also united in demanding a Budget, which would spur the growth to, say, between 8-10 per cent GDP, while containing fiscal deficit.