Union Budget 2019: Govt has $5 trillion ambition & we must try to achieve it, says CII

Vikram Kirloskar, president of CII; Sunil Kant Munjal, chairman of Hero Enterprise; Sumant Sinha, chairman and MD of ReNew Power; Anshuman Magazine, chairman and CEO of CBRE India and SE Asia; and MS Unnikrishnan MD and CEO of Thermax shared their views on Union Budget.

“I thought it was a twin-track speech. It addressed some issues overall but a lot of it covered government’s intent over the next five years. Directionally, what they have proposed to do and there was not enough detail to understand some of them in specific but doing things like providing funding for non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), providing recapitalisation funding for banks as also creating this separate instrument for old litigation, so there are a number of things which are quite impactful right away,” said Munjal.

Speaking about the economy, Kirloskar said, “The thing I felt about the budget overall was they have a USD 5 trillion ambition and we must try to achieve it and she is giving directions on how they want to achieve it. I think that is the kind of feeling that I got.”

“There are many things that they want to do, there are a lot of knots which are tied up, like income tax, trying to build up trust; she talked about trust and I was happy about that because we talked about trust with her before and the income; faceless income tax. I think it’s fantastic, those kind of things are superb,” he added.

Speaking about NBFCs, Sinha said, “There are quite a few positive steps that were interspersed in the budget in various areas. The recognition of the financial sector requiring lot more intervention from the government, the Rs 70,000 crore recapitalisation they talked about, the word NBFC came up in a number of different areas, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) was given a lot more oversight capability into the NBFCs, so I think that the whole area was addressed in a number of ways. I will have to look at the fineprint to see what the impact of all this is going to be,” said Sinha.

On measures that were announced on the tax front, Magazine said, “Prime Minister Awas Yojana (PMAY) scheme has been successful, it has delivered lakhs and lakhs of apartments and now with some tax incentives given is a positive side. However, the government also needs to address the supply side. Going forward, they need to do that.”

“The intent is to ensure that investment happens because a lot more of the items that she spoke about are rural related and even in urban also targeting the voting people of the country. Whatever is being spoken is going to be spurring a lot more of money in the hands of the rural people. I am looking forward to a trickle effect of this to increase the capacity utilisation,” Unnikrishnan mentioned.