According to him, the infrastructure sector was earlier exempt from MAT but few years ago, the exemption was withdrawn. Before the budget announcement, various investor bodies and industry houses have represented for withdrawal of the MAT on infrastructure but this factor was completely ignored. Under such circumstances, the tax holidays will have little sense for the investing community as far as infrastructure is concerned.

Under the infrastructure sector, the budget has come out with a tax holiday benefit to enterprises engaged in developing, operating and maintaining notified special economic zones. Besides, these benefits will also be extended to telecommunication service providers including broadband network and Internet service providers that start providing, such services on or before March 31, 2003. Enterprises, other than those engaged in telecommunication services, will enjoy a tax holiday of 100 per cent in respect of their profits from such activities for a full period of 10 consecutive years.

However, any enterprise engaged in developing, maintaining and operating infrastructure facilities other than ports, airports, inland waterways or inland ports will have the option of availing the benefit of the tax holiday within 20 years as against 15 years. Therefore, there is an urgent need to withdraw MAT from the infrastructure sector. Meanwhile, he also said that the government has been very forthcoming with the new legislation to curb tax avoidance by abuse of transfer pricing. However, now that all international transactions, including purchase, sale or lease of tangible or intangible property, provision of services relate to associated enterprise, the assessment net has been widened. Moreover, the onus lies on the assesses to prove that the price in a transaction between person other than associated enterprises in uncontrolled conditions will be the arm's length price. Therefore, the corporates have to quickly ascertain not only the transactions that have been done with the associatedenterprises but also to determine the transactions that are done at arm's length pricing. Mr Purandare further elaborated that although there are various methods to ascertain the arm length prices the norms have to be clearly laid down as to which method will be applicable for calculating tax .