Speaking in the upcoming Union Budget 2021, Amit Das, Co-founder and CEO of Think360.ai, a data science and analytics company said, “I firmly believe that the government has an opportunity to come up with a paradigm-shifting budget.”
EXPECTATIONS:
On Job Creation and Business opportunities:
“Stimulus that drives “creation” and “recovery”; For example, infrastructure financing with downstream impact on various sectors including the unorganized labor and construction and manufacturing-oriented setups. The year has been tough for the retail and SMB segments. A lot of government programs are designed to be benefits-driven. However, with this budget, there can be some affirmative action around job creation, or business opportunity creation, (with dovetailed information and technology pathways).”
On Driving Financial Inclusion:
“In addition to the financing programs and corpuses being created, we are looking forward to setting up and democratizing of more information and technology highways that drive financial inclusion and recovery of the bottom of the pyramid segments.”
On widening the AI adoption across sectors and country:
“Focus on becoming an AI powerhouse – unlike the previous IT boom where we rode the tailwinds through outsourcing and labor cost arbitrage, we should be focused on leading the AI pack through investments in rural and semi-urban transformative use-cases, building enabling infrastructure, AI parks (on the line of IT parks), beneficial tax regimes, etc.”
On Opportunities for Startups:
“Reforms – Single window for startup compliances – from labor laws to state and central compliances, shop and establishment act, digital contracting, payment and dispute settlement system, patents, IPRs, copyrights, trademarks – a small company deals with multiple authorities and spends a non-trivial amount of time being compliant. If we want youngsters to innovate for the nation, we need to make it easy for them to do so.”
On Government Compliances and New Age Innovations:
“Startup investments – the investment corpuses being laid out are generous, but their deployment needs to be brought into focus this time around. The process of enabling young entrepreneurial talent through investments, support, regulatory sandboxes that allow for innovation. We believe there are enough people out there that want to make a difference, but most of them are scared of dealing with the government. Less governance, more innovation.”