The Pharmaceutical Wholesalers' Association (PWA) has lamented the last minute VAT deferral by the Union government. The association feels the government has played a mockery with the chemists on the All Fools Day.

The Association stated that although the state government is preparing to implement VAT for the last one year, the current stand of the government is to postpone the VAT implementation to an indefinite date has added the ambiguity on the issue further.

According to PWA estimates, in Mumbai alone, on account of the negligence from the government, the pharma traders are losing business of about Rs 10 crore a day, with expenses of Rs 25 lakhs, losing human efforts of 50,000 hours.

The Association consisting of 500 wholesalers and 7,000 retailers in Mumbai have already changed the rate and tax structure of each product physically as per VAT implementation in computer programme. It has taken physical closing stocks of each product, which takes about 12 hours by involving a team of eight people. The members have already changed the software in accordance with VAT by spending a charge of Rs. 1,500 to the programmer.

"Now again our members will have to go back to the old system," lamented the association President, Dilip A. Mehta. "We as a responsible Chemists association educated our members at our cost and convinced them to implement VAT from April 1, 2003. Our members keep the minimum stocks of about 5,000 to 10,000 formulations of different companies with different rates of different tax structure," said Mehta in the release.