Union Budget 2023

Senior Vice President at Moody's Investors Service, Christian de Guzman, said: "Although changes to the tax regime will forego some tax revenue, the budget predicts largely buoyant revenue on the back of strong nominal GDP growth and gains from tax administration. This will help to mitigate pressures on debt affordability from increasing debt servicing costs associated with rising interest rates."

According to Professor of Economics Santanu Basu, in all probability the Union government will, in due course, recover that loss in the long run by adopting some other tactics. "Just a hike by a rupee in the price of petrol and diesel will enable the Union government to not only recover that projected revenue loss but also get excess," Basu said.

World Gold Council Regional CEO Somasundaram P.R. said that while the reduction in custom duty on gold from 12.5 per cent to 10 per cent is a right step, the hike in Agriculture Infrastructure & Development Cess has brought the overall duty to 15 per cent, same as before.

"With the ongoing 5G rollouts in India, the government's decision to establish 100 5G application Labs is a timely move to spur innovation in developing the 5G ecosystem and India relevant use cases," said Manoranjan Mohapatra, CEO, Comviva. There is a great opportunity to combine 5G and AI to improve network speed, responsiveness, and efficiencies, he added.

"The announcements made today capture the pulse of the economy while retaining credibility both in terms of projections as well as committing to the fiscal consolidation glide path. Most importantly, a historic outlay for public capex is a continuation of the heaving lifting since the time of the pandemic and will have a multiplier effect across myriad sectors of the economy besides crowding in private investment," Subhrakant Panda added.

However, the budget, tabled in Parliament on Wednesday, doubled the basic custom duty on kitchen chimneys to 15 per cent, on bicycles from 30 per cent to 35 per cent, and toys and parts of toys (except electronic toy parts) from 60 per cent to 70 per cent, increasing the prices of the imported products.

This is a 'Bahubali' Budget. With one arrow, multiple targets have been shot. Fiscal prudence is achieved with lower deficit and the path has been set till FY26. Consumption is supported through tax cuts. Investment outlay is enhanced.

This even though the economists and majority of the industry captains gave a thumbs-up for the budget proposals. The Sensex of the BSE opened at 60,001.17 points, after closing at 59,549.90 points on Tuesday. Itx touched a high of 60,773.44 points and a low of 58,816.84 points.

Vadodara Chambers of Commerce and Industries president Himanshu Patel, welcoming the Budget, said: "The much needed booster dose has been given by the Finance Minister for the MSME, the tax slab will definitely keep the sector floating. It suffered a major setback in 2020."

Currently, 18 per cent tax is being levied on the commission collected by online gaming companies for games not involving betting or gambling. Among the Union Budget 2023-24 proposals were "removing the minimum threshold of Rs 10,000 for TDS and clarifying taxability relating to online gaming".