I would view this budget to have a positive push to industries across the board. This budget focuses clearly on growth, development and job creation with particular focus on empowering the rural sector.
In January, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister, India had launched ‘Startup India, Standup India’ initiative with the motive to take this sector to a new horizon. Clearly, this budget is in all support to the initiative.
The government has allocated a Rs 500 crore corpus for its Stand-Up India scheme, which was announced in January, to stimulate innovation and startup activity by women and SC/ST entrepreneurs. This will bolster entrepreneurship for SC/ST and as per estimates will benefit 2.5 lakh plus entrepreneurs.
Corporate tax for companies with turnover not exceeding Rs 5 crore has been reduced to 29% plus surcharge and cess. This is a welcome advantage in union to last year’s promise of gradual reduction of corporate tax from 30 per cent to 25 per cent over four years and hence will encourage more to start up.
Read: Budget Highlights
The most positive move and certainly a thumping gift from Arun Jaitley, Finance Minister, India is the announcement of the 100% tax deduction program for three years over a period of five years for startups approved FY2019 under the ‘Startup India, Standup India’ scheme.
This move is going to spark a new energy in the startup sector of the country as it is expected to raise US $700 million and will generate around 5000 jobs in the next 12 months.
Also, an amendment in The Companies Act as proposed in the budget will allow startups to be registered in a day; will be huge relief. Earlier the registration used to take more than a month which was quite taxing. The icing on the cake is the support from The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) giving some positive indications that it will be easing out few foreign investment norms to back up the startup sector of this country.
Overall this is a balanced growth oriented budget with focus on accelerating on the fundamentals.
(Swati Swati Bhargava, co-founder, CashKaro)
