Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman addressed the industry for the first time on Monday after presenting the Budget on February 01. She maintained the Narendra Modi government's pitch the centre is trying implementing "maximum governance and minimum government" and assured business houses that the most fiscally prudent route was being followed.

“Government will want to be a facilitator and we do things with a lot of consultations. Since July budget, for the purposes of wanting to respond to the stakeholder consultations that we have held, because the demand to the economy warranted that we do it, and on some matters, we did come with some intervention but having come up with some interventions we did not leave the rest of the agenda of what we had heard then and moved ahead. We carried that agenda forward and again fine-tuned them and placed them in the context of revenue which is being generated and took a call,” she said.

The minister further added that she has told the taxmen to achieve targets without any overreach.

“Overreaching was an issue which was in the minds of most of the tax assesses and therefore we had a two pronged strategy of one, keeping them motivated and two, making sure that they don’t keep obsessing about targets which we had given them. Whether that has found its immediate impact or not, we still thought it was important for us to express the intent of the government. We trust the taxpayer, and that the tax authorities are going to have to be a lot more objective and that is why we relied on getting technology into a big role and make sure the assessments are more monitored, more documented,” she added.