Although Finance Minister Jaswant Singh has, this year, done away with the exercise of meeting industry groups like CII and Ficci prior to the Budget, there have been a series of presentations by these groups to BJP president Venkaiah Naidu, in the hope that he will pass on to Jaswant Singh, what industry wants to the tell the finance minister but can't.

A high-voltage CII team made a series of sectoral proposals to Naidu on Monday, followed by Assocham on Tuesday.

While the Assocham representation was largely kept simple and restricted itself to the Budget requirements of Indian industry, CII presented a macro picture of the Indian economy and the role of the private sector as a way of sensitising the ruling political party to the needs of India's private sector.

The team that met Naidu comprised CII president Ashok Soota, Sunil Minjal, Satish Kaura, Vinayak Chatterjee, Tarun Das, Omkar Goswami and Shubhashis Gangopadhyay.

Among the issues raised in the presentations were disadvantages to Indian industry through various instrumentalities imposed by other countries, the problem of financing for the small scale sector and the need to have a better definition of small scale industries, the need to promote a 'Made in India' label for the manufacturing sector and conditions created for better accessibility of this sector to cheaper finance, etc.

Significantly, the presentations were, by and large, silent on those aspects of the Rajnath panel report that recommending taxing corporate India to help the underprivileged and the middle classes.