Industry Speak: Rajesh Bhatia, Neeraj Jain, Harsha V Agarwal

Rajesh Bhatia, global and group CFO, Uflex, said, “It is a balanced budget with focus on infrastructure development, privatisation and disinvestment (huge divestment target of Rs 1.75-lakh crore), major push in government capex and credit expansion.”

He said the move to dedicate over Rs 1.4-lakh crore over the next five years towards Urban Swachh Bharat Mission 2.0 shows the resolve to manage the challenges of plastic waste in the country, with a firm approach.

“Our joint project with CIPET for Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) Sorting and Segregation in Bangalore and Varanasi to separate the recoverable from the garbage and recycle the plastic waste constituents is a technology that complements the efforts of our government to manage plastic waste,” he added.

Neeraj Jain, CFO, Cosmo Films, said, “It is a decent budget with focus on infrastructure, in-house manufacturing, healthcare and others. There are positives with respect to movement towards simplicity and rationalisation. Increase in custody duty and incentives to in-house manufacturing are the need of the hour. The government could have focused on providing more incentive to industries having export potential and providing PLI incentive similar to the textile industry. The aggressive government borrowing plan for FY 21-22 may cause interest rate to increase.”

Harsha V Agarwal, director, Emami, said, “It has been a good budget. With key focus on building an Atmanirbhar Bharat, there are significant allocations for infrastructure building, especially for rural India. The budget enhances allocation to agri-credit and also priorities the agricultural and agri-allied sectors. All these measures are expected in generating an increase in rural consumption which is necessary for reviving the Indian economy.”