Samir Sathe, Executive Vice President, Wadhwani Advantage at Wadhwani Foundation

 “The government must do three things; firstly, improving the capabilities of MSMEs to help them generate demand from large companies, secondly, creating market access sector-specific platforms in chosen industries of national advantage, and finally treat SMEs and startups with an integrated approach than with a stand-alone one, for the mutually reinforcing systemwide impact”.

·        Shan Kadavil, CEO & Co-Founder, FreshToHome

“We hope this budget will be about measures to bring about growth and resilience from the pandemic. As we witnessed during the pandemic, a large part of this growth will be brought through bringing in the unorganised players to mainstream business and a key theme will be Offline to Online – O2O. O2O will lead to transparency in payments, transactions, compliance with taxes, labour laws and larger employment opportunities for the youth. Specific to E-Commerce and E-Grocery, we believe this is an opportune time for the government to try to rationalise GST rates, compliance processes, FDI policies and ride the buoyancy revenue curves to make it a win-win situation.”

·       Ram Kewalramani, Co-founder & Managing Director, CredAble

After a cataclysmic 2020, India looks forward to innovative and robust support from the Government of India in form of various incentives, tax cuts, subsidies, access to credit to essentially battle and cope with the cascade effect of the brutal pandemic, which many are still reeling under. When it came to public knowledge that this year Budget will be paperless and presented digitally, the words of FM “Thiswill be unlike anything in the past 100 years” truly raised expectations. 

Liquidity is a lifeline in tough times like these and more so in 2021. Thus it is expected that budget 2021 will enable and incentivize NBFCs, startups in the space of lending especially in the areas of working capital financing, as well as tech and non-tech financial institutions structurally, because this ultimately turns the economic wheels largely. 

·       Praveen Dhabhai, CEO, PayWorld

The year 2020 brought in large scale changes for all sectors. The fintech industry faced both challenges and opportunities last year. While the pandemic pushed people towards digital payments, the lack of digital infrastructure was an impediment for the industry. The Union Budget should take measures to create physical infrastructure to help the fintech industry and help spread financial inclusion which is the government’s stated objective. The government should also take both fiscal and regulatory measures to further increase the penetration of digital transactions.

There is an immediate need for the Budget to look at rationalization of taxes and reduction of corporate tax for start-ups. The government should reduce corporate tax for start-ups to enable financial empowerment.

We seek simplified GST rules for remittances business as at present due to high GST almost 30 per cent of charges goes in taxes. This is increasing the cost of transaction and hampering growth. The government should consider tax breaks for merchants providing digital payments”