On February 1, the Union Budget for 2023–24 is scheduled to be presented in Parliament by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
India progressively expands to become a digital capability hub, and with that comes a lot of expectations towards the sector hoping to contribute towards the growth, herein are some expectations, we would like our finance minister to thereby look into
- Introduce tax breaks in GST and TDS for Fintech to expand and deliver the impact of government schemes.
- Bring Service Linked Incentive Schemes like Production Linked Incentive Schemes to improve the workflow.
- Focus on supporting infrastructure and internet penetration in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.
- Simplifying the permissions process to facilitate remote working.
- Launch Initiatives and incentives to make-in-India software products and platforms.
Education and Healthcare are the primary sectors for the future of any country.
On Healthcare, we urge the finance minister to:
- Allocate funds for digitization in the healthcare sector e.g. telemedicine / virtual care solutions, referral management systems, Personal Health Records/Electronic Health Records (PHR/ EHR).
- Increase Tax benefits on preventive health check-ups.
- Ensure Health Insurance for India’s Missing Middle Age population.
- To establish an extensive healthcare infrastructure fund.
- Fin ministry should support healthcare by reducing taxes on medicine and hospitalization costs.
- Government hospitals should have start-of-the art facilities, excellent doctors & paramedics by investing in the same which will help society.
- Rural health should be given priority and need to focus on digital transformation in that area so that we can have a healthy society using the data that will be available to the health ministry to address any issues at the right time.
On Education:
There needs to be constant support in training and upskilling the teachers in the country. The government needs to support & incentivize them to get them motivated and do a great job producing excellent students.
- The government should help create good school infrastructure and reduce taxes for the same.
- Essential funds need to be allocated to talent development and digital skilling, including schools and universities.
- Smart schools with AR&VR should be introduced by funding the schools under them.
- Incentivise private players (by reducing/ making tax-free) to help in creating better infra and other teaching & evaluation tools to measure the real performance of both the students & teachers.
Since key trends and demands largely revolve around digitalization here are some important perspectives on the upward growth
- encourage investment in R&D, Technology Solutions, and Digital Programs.
- cybersecurity should be promoted in all sectors, especially in Healthcare and BFSI.
- upskilling to ensure new age technologies – AI, ML, Cloud services.
- educating the youth through the Skill India program to ensure essential talent building.
- providing huge tax benefits to start-ups and others for creating tools using IoT and AI.
