After Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced the Union Budget for financial year 2017-18 on Wednesday, there have been some diverse reactions from various sections including politicians, economists, experts as well as social media.
Here is what the experts are saying:
Shaktikanta Das, Economic Affairs Secretary
Das lauded the “11 major reforms”, including affordable housing and income tax rates, in Budget 2017. In an interview to ET Now, he pointed out the government's lack of vision on rolling out Universal Basic Income scheme.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Paytm Founder & CEO
Sharma welcomed the government’s ‘digital’ inclination and the tax incentives. He said, “Every person from a small shops to consumers are pushed towards the digital economy. Tax benefits, incentives to use digital payments and extending loans based on a digital footprint will create a larger merchant ecosystem for digital payments.
Deepak Parekh, Chairman, HDFC
Parekh said, “A good budget has done a lot for housing and for rural development. Disappointed with no announcement on corporate tax.”
C Rangarajan, Former RBI Governor
“It was a fairly routine Budget... in the sense that there have not been much changes on the revenue side. Nevertheless, I am happy that the fiscal deficit is maintained at 3.2 per cent. The original road map has set it at 3 per cent.”
Varun Khandelwal, MD, Bullero Capital
After Jaitley announced the fiscal deficit target for 2017-18 at 3.2 percent of GDP, and revenue deficit at 1.9 percent, the Bullero Capital managing director said it does not seem “very credible” and that “people will question the fiscal math over the next few days.”
“On tax reforms, the only worthy mention, and an intelligent one, is the selective reduction of corporate tax rate for companies below 500 million rupee turnover. This will encourage higher compliance at the lower level of the corporate pyramid where percentage of tax leakages is usually much higher,” he added.
Arvind Subramanian, Chief Economic Adviser
“Fiscal deficit mark is consistent with steady consolidation path. Government is not breaching any target on fiscal front; still on consolidation path. Rise in public investment will help shortfall in private investment.”
Rahul Bajaj, Chairman, Bajaj Auto
“The proposal aimed to curb electoral funding in the Union Budget 2017 is very welcome,” said Bajaj.
In order to ensure transparency in political funding, Jaitley also announced setting cash limit on donations to political parties at Rs 2,000.
“Rs 2,000 from Rs 20,000, so no amount of anonymous money is possible now,” Bajaj said.
Biswanath Bhattacharya, Partner, KPMG, India
“The set of initiatives announced seem to acknowledge the challenge that Railways is losing share in both freight and premium passenger services to alternate modes of transport, and hence an integrated approach to improving safety, cleanliness and passenger comfort, and higher levels of service to freight customers through end to end services have been introduced in this budget.”
Sunil Munjal, Joint MD, Hero MotoCorp Ltd.
Munjal welcomed the dramatic increase in infrastructure spending proposed by the Finance Minister.
While the auto sector had no specific demands from the finance minister in this budget, the industry needed infrastructure to improve, Munjal said.
The budget will provide encouragement to activities which have a high multiplier effect such as housing, he added.
(With inputs from Moneycontrol, Financial Express, BloombergQuint and Livemint)
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