Industries and the fintech sector in the country are expecting announcements of new initiatives by the Government in the Union Budget 2022-23 which could help them grow exponentially.

The Union Budget 2022-23 will be tabled in the Parliament on February 1 (Tuesday).

On pre-budget expectations, Nishant Arora, co-founder and director, Setup Services India (SSI), a unit of Sixth Element Finserv, said, “We expect relaxed tax structures and capital gains framework so that foreign institutional investors and investment funds can directly introduce their capital and provide funding to Indian registered entities and not divert their funds to the holding concerns of such startups, registered in countries like Singapore, that have been specifically registered to divert the governance and management control to foreign land to reduce the tax and compliance burden.”

Vimal Alawadhi, MD, Best Agrolife Ltd, said the Indian Agrochemical industry requires an attractive PLI scheme, along with ease of transporting with lesser intermediates within the country. These implementations can prove vital in the coming year for the industry.

“We also hope the government comes up with reforms to rationalize GST on agrochemicals (reduce GST 18% to 6%) to meet the objective of ‘Doubling Farmer’s Income’,” Alawadhi said.

Talking about the fintech sector, Vineet Tyagi, Global CTO, Biz2X, said, “We hope, through the Union Budget 2022-23, the Government will bring game-changing reforms, new policies, and regulations that will offer relief and tax sops to MSMEs and the overall startup ecosystem. In 2022, we expect that the Government to focus more on the development of digital infrastructure to enhance customer experiences, credit quality, and streamline the growth of financial entities in FY22-23.”

Vivek Banka, Founding Team, Goalteller, said, ”My expectations towards this year’s budget is status quo which in itself would bode well for everyone in the ecosystem. Whether it be personal taxes, corporate taxes or capital gain taxes the regime should be made easier and progressively lower as the government has themselves stated earlier.”

Sanjay Sharma, MD – Aye Finance, said, ”The Government should consider extending and expanding the ECLGS program for better part of the new FY. It is important that rates of interest in these schemes should not be capped so that lenders are encouraged to make these funds flow to the micro scale businesses where their operating costs are high.”

”Capping the rate of interest diverts most of these funds to the bigger enterprises and thus starves the most needy micro businesses. Loan restructure program has been the life support for so many micro businesses that have been established by years of toil by the business owner. We are not yet out of the woods and the lenders should hence be allowed to extend the restructuring window by 6-12 more months, to enable these businesses to pull through this trough,” Sharma said.

Anil Pinapala, CEO and Co-Founder of Vivifi India Finance, said, ”In the upcoming union budget, I hope to see a strong mandate for financial inclusion and assistance from the GoI for start-ups attempting to bring in credit for all transcending language, literacy, location, livelihood like FlexPay. Relaxation in norms and assistance with liquidity to lending NBFC fintechs who are attempting to offer credit to the under-served and unserved would be a welcome move. I also hope that non-prime lending could be brought under priority sector so that NBFCs can truly work to bring credit to all.”