Karachi: The federal government has proposed tax on foreign drama serials and films to discourage airing of imported but cheap Television plays in the national budget that was tabled Wednesday in the parliament in Islamabad.
Pakistan’s finance minister Ishaq Dar reading out the new budget in the national assembly proposed Rs100,000 withholding tax on each episode of drama serial. He also proposed a one million rupees tax on a foreign feature film.
Exhibition of Indian films at the Pakistani cinemas, and Turkish, Indian, Spanish dramas on the private television channels were quite rampant which was being resented by some of the local artists, producers and critics.
The local artists were demanding the government of banning the foreign dramas as they believed that cultural invasion was snatching away the remaining outlets available for Pakistani artists to exploit their talent.
The proposed tax, some of them believed, would help Pakistani dramas that were losing out prime time space to foreign dramas, to gain their footing again.
Pakistani TV dramas became much popular in the 19980s and 1990s after its film industry collapsed and the artists moved to small screen.
The government has also announced to end the secret funds of the various ministries and the intelligence agencies to bring in financial order in among the ministerial officials.
Pakistan was faced with record 8.8 per cent fiscal deficit in the current year that commanded heavy cut into spending and exploring more revenues.
The finance minister has tasked himself to bring down the deficit to 6.3 per cent of GDP from the existing historic levels.
The finance minister said that new taxes and other measures would raise the national revenues by 21 per cent for the new financial year to Rs28.4 trillion or $28 billion.
