Several IT company heads and the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), the industry body for IT industry, have shared their main recommendations for Budget 2019-20.
Rishi Bhatnagar, chairman of IET IoT Panel
Government should publish an implementation plan / roadmap for the strategies outlined in NDCP 2018. Budget 2019 should allocate funds in-line with the plan for the implementation.
India should establish a landing page for global or local OEMs and enterprise customers, if they want to use either IoT services in India and they are looking for contact partner who can support them, or contact partner, who can support them to adapt local services for the global market
India should reduce duties on imported components like chipsets, network modules etc to encourage IoT hardware assembly in India, which shall also help in bringing the cost of IoT devices down.
Shibu Paul, regional sales director – APAC at Array Networks
There should be reduction in duties on IT networking products. There should be a strong domestic manufacturing policy favoring global companies to invest more in India. The budget should reassess the preferential market access policy and ensure that honest tax paying citizens are given privilege and preference.
MA Mannan, country manager – SAARC at Corsair
The current 18 percent GST bracket should be brought down to 4-8 percent to help the IT industry as well as the consumers.
Rajendra Chitale, CFO at Crayon Software Experts India
India government should create policy frameworks that incentivize big businesses to invest in manufacturing locally in India.
Government had provided for non-deduction of withholding tax on reselling of software licenses – primarily considering the very low margins in this trade and the fact that resellers are not making any changes to the licenses purchased from the OEMs. The Government should come out with specific notification to extend the scope of the term “Software” as defined under NOTIFICATION No. 21/2012 [F. No. 142/10/2012-SO(TPL)] S. O. 1323(E), DATED 13-6-2012.
Sonit Jain, CEO of GajShield Infotech
A strong push towards rural e-infrastructure with added emphasis on security compliance and data protection would be beneficial. Implementing zero GST set-off for companies using SaaS application hosted outside India will enforce companies to setup data centers in India thus boosting jobs as well as infrastructure. Incentives should be given for making digital payments for the additional transparency they provide. This year’s budget should promote companies manufacturing IT products locally by giving them added advantage like tax exemption or incentive on IT exports.
Krishna Raj Sharma, CEO, iValue InfoSolutions
The Government can look at tax slabs for corporate like in the case of individuals so that large entities pay more and SMBs pay less tax to ensure that they support them in creating new jobs.
Rajaram Vidyavar, director – Commercial Netrack Enclosures
Tax deductions on locally manufactured products and special packages for manufacturing hubs will achieve zero imports by 2020.
Prashanth GJ, CEO at TechnoBind
MSMEs want easy availability of credit to sustain and grow their operations.
Rajarshi Bhattacharyya, country manager, SUSE
Government should create policy frameworks that incentivize fresh investment and new business opportunities to transform India into a global manufacturing hub.
Debjani Ghosh, President, NASSCOM
India government should reduce rates of Tax Deducted at Source (TDS) for payment to call centers from 10 percent to 2 percent. This is important for small and medium sized software product companies.
Foreign companies are not willing to send their employees to India on deputation, impacting business activity due to tax authorities construing service Permanent Establishment (PE) of foreign company in India by mere secondment of employees of foreign company to India. Hence, there should be a review of income tax provisions relating to secondment of employees to India.
NASSCOM has raised concerns pertaining to determination of place of supply, blockage in working capital due to self-supplies, treatment of head office branch office transactions, SEZ procurements etc. which require an urgent resolution from the GST team.
Rajesh Ram Mishra, president at India Electronics and Semiconductor Association IESA
India should address concerns on disincentive for domestic manufacturing and products designed in India due to differential duty structure in multiple segments.
India should abolish the Angel Tax for ESDM start-ups.
Government should create a seed fund of Rs 1000 Crore which can be matched by industry and VCs to provide seed funding to build 1000 start ups in ESDM space.
India government should enable R&D through provisioning separate budget to fund projects of national interest in the Electronics and Semiconductor domain and enable collaborative R&D among PSUs, Indian SMEs and start-ups.
Government should provide support to create 50 Intelligent Electronics Incubators collaborating with industry in various technology and industry verticals in Mission Mode, similar to Atal Innovation Mission.