With the third wave of the coronavirus impacting restaurant revenues by 50-60 per cent, Kabir Suri, the recently appointed president of the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI), is pushing for major reliefs for the sector from the upcoming Union Budget, including tax holidays, relief on GST payments, a separate ministry for the hospitality sector and standardised restrictions across States.

Speaking to BusinessLine, Suri said restaurants had started to gain more business in the second quarter but the third wave has once again disrupted the sector. “If we look at the listed restaurants, in the Q3, restaurants were at 80-85 per cent of their pre-Covid revenues. However, with the spread of the Omicron variant and new restrictions pan-India, sales are down by 50-60 per cent,” he said.

Suri, who is also the Co-Founder & Director, Azure Hospitality, said the pandemic has been detrimental for industry players. In a domino effect, the food and beverage industry, which is the second-largest employment generator, has lost close to two million employees from their workforce.

Despite all this, there is not much relief for the industry in terms of policy, he said. “Our industry is the first to shut and the last to open. At least 25 to 30 per cent of the restaurants were never able to open up again. Those who survived had to either dilute equity or infuse fresh equity. Those who already had taken loans were able to leverage funds from the banks, while a few others were able to go ahead with their IPO,” Suri said.

When asked what was their expectation from the upcoming budget, he explained, “Four years ago, the GST was removed, and there was input tax credit given, we’d like that back. The food and beverage industry was hit very hard and had a severe loss in their revenues, the industry body was looking at tax holidays. Besides, we were hoping blanket Covid-19-related norms across States rather than stake level norms.”

He further said rather than reducing the number of hours of operations and having larger volumes of people waiting outside restaurants, it would be a feasible option if restaurants had longer working hours permission.

Speaking about other State-related issues, which weren’t specifically related to the budget, he said each State had different compliance requirements, and multiple licenses apart from different excise rates. Suri said the NRAI was hoping “if we could have a ministry of our own where in all our grievances were addressed and there were centralised rules implemented.”