Budget 2022-23 must have a clear road map to make India drive towards the 5 trillion $ dream - BCG India
As the Union Budget 2022-23 draws close, various sectors and industries are pinning hopes to give the economy a shot in the arm. There is great anticipation in terms of support from the government to provide the much-needed relief in certain focus areas and the government’s thrust is expected to be on different sectors—education, consumer industry, financial services, health care, energy, technology, media & telecommunications and more—to attain its vision of becoming a $5 trillion economy.
Experts and thought leaders across sectors share their strategic, incisive and industry-specific perspectives on the expectations—and their impact—from the upcoming Union Budget 2022-23.
[box type=”shadow” align=”” class=”” width=””]Digital, Technology, and Data
Saurabh Chandra, Managing Director, BCG Platinion
In today’s digital world, the consequences for human welfare are directly tied up with the country’s technology innovation & investment focus. For a country to grow capital per head, an exogenous increase in technology causes the production function & saving curve to rise. This leads to higher per capita output & higher capital labor ratio. Thus, increase in technology over time results in growth of output over time, leading to better per capita income of individuals. Four focus areas around digital & technology that I recommend in upcoming union budget are:
Fuel multiplier effect by enhancing technology investment funds & making foreign investment silk route easier for Indian technology start-ups’, unicorns & decacorns who are enhancing the capital-labor ratio for the country.
Identify country’s next growth opportunities using data: The future growth of any country will be decided by the way the country manages its data. It will be an important investment to create “a country wide central data innovation hub”, to centrally manage, mine, analyze, forecast and consume PII, Payments & various country data.
Secure the nation digital assets by strengthening cyber: The advent of digitization, demands focus on cyber. To protect digital assets of the country, the need of the hour is to re-imagine cyber security by creating a central proactive cyber hub integrated with threat analysis centres around the world and powered by technology such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to proactively decipher threat detection intelligence to safeguard either government institutes assets or ensure national security.
Increase financial & digital inclusion index across Indian states enhancing technology infrastructure and making inroads for faster adoption of newer technologies. [/box]
[box type=”shadow” align=”” class=”” width=””]Abhik Chatterjee, Platinion Managing Director
India’s bold Digital vision sits on three core pillars – world class Infrastructure, governance & services and empowerment of citizens. Developing a “bold digital muscle” is as critical as the infrastructure itself, comprising of a digital ready workforce, enhanced collaboration between Industry-Academia-Startups, focused investments in cutting edge technologies and industry focused digital centres of excellence.
In the upcoming Union Budget, I would like to recommend four focus initiatives aimed at building this digital muscle:
- Creating India’s future ready workforce: The need to do a NASSCOM beyond IT & ITeS into large scale manufacturing and penetrate further into the unorganized sectors will be key. From a conscious push on basic “digital literacy” right at primary education to additional grants for specialized development in hot areas such as Digital Product Development, Strategic and Industrial Design, Data Science, Data Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and ESG technologies would make a big difference in our readiness to manage this mega-talent crunch for the next decade.
- Fostering the trifecta-collaboration between Industry, Academia and Startups: The “circular impact of demand-supply led by governments incentivization” shall serve as critical fuel for home-grown start-ups to achieve scale at unprecedented pace and for the industry (large and MSMEs) to engage made-in-India solutions thus generating tremendous value. Beginning with developing awareness by digitizing the demand-supply ecosystem through a national opportunity platform would help in opening our eyes to this massive untapped value pool.
- Increase investment on Emerging Technologies, Innovation and R&D: India’s continuous hunger to be a top nation in Innovation and Digital demands persistent and significant investments on Data, Cybersecurity, Quantum Compute, Internet of Things / Devices, ESG & GreenTech, Waste to Wealth & alternate technologies capabilities and significant push on building Intellectual property in these areas.
- Concentrated push on Industry Digital Centres of Excellence: Our industries are yet to see the full fruit of digital impact; enabling industrial clusters with associated Digital Centers of Excellence e.g. Manufacturing / industrial centers on Mobility & EV, Internet of Things / robotics-automation and ESG / GreenTech; similarly, Pharma & HealthCare around Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Compute for R&D etc. will accelerate digital attractiveness, focused sectoral excellence, access to top-talent and more job creation opportunities.[/box]
