Bengaluru: Corporates in Bengaluru welcomed the 2020-21 Union Budget for being comprehensive and focusing on rural India as well.
“There is stability, overall it is a good Budget. Initially the focus was on rural, that’s very important part of our economy and we need to. 54 per cent of our population lives there. The 15-point agenda on that is very innovative,” CII Karnataka chairman Aman Choudhari told IANS at the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) roundtable on the Budget.
From the business point of view, according to Choudhari, there were some good initiatives such as redoing the Dividend Distribution Tax (DDT) and making it simpler.
“It may increase tax on richer people. It makes it simpler for the average man to compute his income,” said Choudhari.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announcing the plan to amend the Companies Act and introduce a Taxpayer Charter drew applause from CII members here.
“Tax payer charter will be something like if you are in the right you will not be harassed. What does the law say, innocent until proved guilty. Challenge is how do you make sure that the law is followed at the tax payer level,” said the CII Karnataka chairman.
Manoj Kumar, partner, Deloitte said abolishing the DDT is the single largest change.
“Dividend Distribution Tax is the single largest change that they have made for the corporate sector. Abolishing DDT is quite beneficial to the corporate sector,” said Kumar.
Kumar welcomed Sitharaman’s decision to introduce 150 passenger trains through privatisation. Quoting the Economic Survey, he reasoned that the government has performed well when it has privatised sectors.
“Private participation has been more efficient compared to sectors where government has operated on its own,” he said.
He also heaped praise on the amnesty programme scheme introduced by the government.
However, Kumar said the government has announced several programmes whose success depends on how it will implement them.
“There are just a plethora of schemes that they have announced. But the key to the success is going to be implementation. So they seem to have taken too much on themselves in terms of number of schemes. And therefore the success of the Budget will depend on how these are implemented,” he said.
Sanjeev Ghatpalya from the company Mind Teck appreciated the importance Sitharaman gave to new age technologies.
“So far data analytics has never been used so much, now by articulating it in a more formal way in the Budget, it is a great thing to do,” said Ghatpalya.
Wider use of technology and data centres to enable data use at the panchayat level is a welcome move, he said.
In her Budget speech, the finance minister reiterated that data is the new oil, announcing that a new policy would be brought to enable the private sector.
She mentioned Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and 3D printing as part of the new economy.
A bunch of CII members huddled together at a hotel in Bengaluru, listened to the entire Budget speech, took notes and reflected upon it.
