With just weeks remaining to the presentation of the Union Budget 2023, Deloitte’s Anand Ramanathan shared what he expects from the Finance Minister.
“It would be good to see some incentivisation in newer areas for example plant-based protein is a lot more sustainable from an agri-business standpoint. So, how will the budget look at incentivising some of these newer areas of consumption will be useful to see,” Ramanathan told ET Now.
“The second big area is around technology is agriculture. Demand is outstripping supply across multiple categories and hence what is it that can be done to intensify. This too will be a very important area and what kind of incentives are provided for technologies which can help get more from less land resources, because land resources are going to get diverted to manufacturing and services and other areas as the economy grows and hence how can you get more from agriculture by using technology which will help you intensify cultivation and at the same time look at traceability, for example how can we track how the food product or the agri product is grown as well as produced and hence what can be done to incentivise technology investments in these areas,” he said.
Ramanathan said that the third area is to look at processing itself. “We look at agri business and allied areas like food processing – they are a very big employment generator and hence what can be done to extending some of the incentives around PLIs, for example, which we saw beyond a certain investment range to the MSME sector itself which employs a large number of people in the food processing space. So that would be an interesting area where, if there is incentivisation to look at greater capacities for different sectors both across carbohydrates, proteins as well as fresh produce – again a useful and important opportunity,” he concluded.
