Post-Budget reaction by Gartner India
Post-Budget quote from Research Director at Gartner India Arup Roy:
Overall I would view this budget to have a positive push to industries across the board and augurs well for IT industry as well. This budget focuses clearly on growth, development and job creation with particular focus on infusing growth in manufacturing and infrastructure sectors. From industry perspective, the policies that would have major positive impact on the domestic IT uptake are: ‘Digital India’ program; “Good Governance”; and “one hundred smart cities” program. Also, FDI cap increase in defense and insurance sector is a huge positive and has direct bearing on IT industry. This budget has also set aside funding for adding new top-notch educational institutions such as the IITs and IIMs in various cities, which is likely to have a long term impact on generating technical and management talent. Lastly the focus on micro and small and medium sized businesses and their enablement/empowerment with various schemes is a huge positive and is likely to have positive impact on the IT industry as well as such companies get empowered to resort to technology. The orientation towards growth across sectors augurs well for the domestic IT industry however things more or less remain ‘status quo’ from offshore or exports perspective as there is no change in the position there. One area where we would have expected some concrete decision taken would be retrospective taxes and the position thereof. But overall, this is a balanced growth oriented budget with focus on accelerating on the fundamentals.