He said the country should move towards a central value-added tax (VAT) system, adding "if 100 countries around the world could adopt such a system there is no reason why we should not have this".

Sinha said concerns for revenue and the difficult financial position forced the Government to be less adventurous with regard to restructuring the customs duty, which had been reduced to five slabs from seven slabs.

Javed Chaudhary, Revenue Secretary, Ministry of Finance, also gave the assurance that the tax anomalies in the Budget would be addressed through better enforcement of safeguard laws and levy of anti-dumping duties. He said the tax anomalies would be corrected over a period of time, perhaps over the next two budgets.

The Revenue Secretary also said that the Government wasworking towards increasing the tax base to cover around three to four crore persons -- or three to four per cent of the total population.

The Finance Minister assured that the Government would go in for large-scale strategic sale of public sector undertakings in the coming fiscal.

He expressed confidence on meeting the disinvestment target of Rs 10,000 crore set in the Union Budget 1999-2000, despite the Government's decision to defer divestment of its five per cent stake in the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) till the next financial year. ``The IOC deferment will not have a major impact on our divestment targets and we are confident of meeting them,'' he said. The proposed disinvestment in IOC was deferred because the prices of the IOC scrip were unduly depressed.

The FM informed newspersons that several PSUs were being considered for strategic sales. Sinha said this was the first time the Government had talked about privatisation in the Union Budget and it would not shy away from it.

The FinanceMinister also gave the assurance that all the pending legislations, including the Insurance Regulatory Authority (IRA) Bill will be passed in the current session of Parliament, which will be on till May.

Mentioning that there were no `devils' in fine print, as pointed out by the former finance minister, P Chidambaram, in his criticism of the Budget, Sinha urged the industry to take a holistic view of the Budget in the light of the various constraints the economy was facing -- like the downturn in the industry, declining exports and the dismal fiscal situation.