-Mr. Ali Sait, 

-CEO, Tech Avant-Garde  Bengaluru,

“The Union Budget should prioritise Avant-Gardecreating an enabling environment for education by focusing on the sector’s digital transformation. While the primary goal of the NEP is to ensure everyone has access to education, it suffers from lack of infrastructure, especially digital, in rural and semi-urban areas. We believe that there should be dedicated funds to assist educational institutions in building and scaling digital infrastructure to become hybrid learning centers. Given that India is one of the world’s youngest and largest countries, hybrid learning is the best way to ensure that quality education reaches every corner of the country.”

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Health Pre-Budget Quote

-Mr. Yuichi Nagano, 

-Managing Director, Sakra World Hospital Bengaluru,

As a country, India has shown remarkable growth and progress while managing a pandemic and becoming a preferred destination for medical treatments over the last few years. However, we are still reeling with certain infrastructural shortcomings that must be addressed in the upcoming union budget. As we know, that by 2025, the government is expected to increase the public investment from 1.29% of GDP to at least 2.5-3%. While we are taking steps towards becoming a digitized nation, we must also look into strengthening the medical fraternity holistically in terms of healthcare education, training and skill development and thereby, increasing the number of doctors available geographically for every nook and corner of the country, invest towards building more care and awareness programs for intensive care and preventive healthcare which includes mental health and overall wellness. It is only after we start investing in infrastructure and innovation, that we can look at strong private and public partnerships to create a technologically-advanced robust healthcare ecosystem that offers affordable, newer, out-of-the-box, innovative healthcare solutions to further reduce the burden, especially while catering to the underprivileged.

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Startup Pre-Budget Quote 

-Vijender Reddy Muthyala, 

-Co-founder and CEO of DrinkPrime Bengaluru, 

While we applaud the government for making drinking water more accessible through initiatives like the Jal Jeevan Mission-Har Ghar Jal, we believe it is critical to make safe drinking water more affordable. Lowering or eliminating GST on water purifiers, as consumer durable, will help treat them as an essential service required by all Indians. It will encourage people to invest in their health while helping mission oriented brands like DrinkPrime provide clean, safe and healthy drinking water to everyone. 

Lake rejuvenation and ground water regeneration is the need of the hour. There are several NGOs and startups that would benefit greatly if the government would sanction some budget for the same or launch initiatives that serve the purpose. 

Similarly, taxation on ESOPs should occur at the final sale of shares rather than when they are offered. This makes attracting good talent difficult in an already competitive market with a severe talent shortage. If this is addressed, organisations will be able to offer additional benefits to potential or high-performing employees.

As more smart city plans flow out, we request the government to also focus on IoT technology as it is definitely the future of smart ownership.