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Below are Perspective on Union Budget 2021-22 By Mr. Sanjay Kumar, CEO & MD, Elior India

" The welcome move is around the fact that the fiscal deficit has been pegged at 6.8% for FY22 which shows that the government wishes to continue spending and driving growth through infrastructure which I think in the short term will be useful.

The monetization of other assets like land, etc, and streamlining of the structures to enable that will be very useful. The intent to undertake strategic disinvestment is good but this is something that has been in the pipeline for a long time hence the real test will be in ensuring that at least one or two big-ticket strategic disinvestments go through to create that confidence in the market that the government is serious about monetizing its assets in areas where there is a low return on the capital.

It would really have helped if there were measures to increase consumption but that hasn’t been seen and therefore, the middle class is going to continue to feel the pain in the months ahead on the back of high taxes. On the GST it was disappointing as the FM didn’t lay out a clear path on how the GST rationalization will take place. What we have seen is that there is a comment on the inverted duty structure being realigned but that is only so far as to calibrate the domestic GST into the imports and ensuring that there is an inverted duty structure. But on the wider issue of rationalizing GST and streamlining the input tax credit, there wasn’t a comment on that so there is a bit of a disappointment there with regards to the agriculture commodity sector.

Overall, this is a great budget in terms of defining the government’s intent and roadmap including the modifications to the FRBM, which I think was much needed, it was designed at a different time with a different objective. I would say that on a scale of 1 to 10, I would rank this budget at a 7.5, and now the real test would of course be its real implementation which can take it to a 10/10 if even 70% of what is stated gets implemented.”

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