The BGA India Team, led by Managing Director Ratan Shrivastava, wrote an update to clients on India’s new budget for 2023-2024. 

Context

  • The bill continues its steadfast emphasis on boosting growth, infrastructure and investments without diluting fiscal targets.
  • It lays the foundation for a technology-driven and knowledge-based economy, with strong public finances and a robust financial sector.

Significance

  • The budget continues its focus on increasing ease of doing business, accelerating innovation in emerging technologies, mainstreaming sustainability and promoting digital public goods by expanding the scope of digital and financial services. The finance minister highlighted that India has become the fifth largest economy in the world and demonstrated a growth rate of 7 percent in FY23 due to a pragmatic focus on reducing the current account deficit while still ensuring inclusive growth.
  • The finance bill focuses on fiscal consolidation while still providing record capital expenditure allocation, direct tax cuts, lowering the fiscal deficit and social sector benefits. It lowers the fiscal deficit target for FY24 to 5.9 percent of GDP and aims to go below 4.5 percent by FY26. 

Implications

  • Businesses will now be required to use a permanent account number (PAN) as the common identifier for all digital systems of specified agencies and use the cloud-based “Entity DigiLocke” to securely share documents with authorities, regulators and banks.
  • Businesses can expect niche opportunities in urban infrastructure and logistics, data centers, emerging technologies, bioenergy, health, food and tourism services asinfrastructure, energy, digital economy, technology and manufacturing will continue to remain key growth sectors.

BGA will continue to keep you updated on developments in India as they occur. If you have any comments or questions, please contact BGA India Managing Director Ratan Shrivastava at ratan@bowergroup.com.

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Managing Director

Ratan is a senior executive and management consulting professional who has a proven track record in government, consulting and industry across India and Southeast Asia, with a wide network across stakeholders. He has been instrumental in developing and implementing growth strategies for both the public and private sector and has led diverse teams to secure new market opportunities. Prior to joining BGA, Ratan was at KPMG India where he helped the integration of the small and medium industry clusters, with the domestic and global aerospace, defense and space supply chains. He also served as an advisor at the Federation of ... Read More