Indian Union Budget 2021-22: Covid-19 pandemic gripped the globe in year 2020 and shoved it towards a new order of carrying out issues. While the pandemic gradually and steadily spread across the globe, it changed a lot of perceptions, touched the life of each and every one of us in its personal way and taught us a decade worth of lessons. It gave us a rapidly paced peek into the future and even though we had been scrambling to adjust to the new approaches, a lot of men and women have been left far behind, however once again!
While standard business enterprise meetings, court hearings and classroom sessions got stalled entirely for a couple of weeks, it was sooner rather than later realized that the pandemic is not going away in a quick time. Businesses, experts and even our country’s Courts switched more than to virtual meetings and platforms to conduct their official work day-to-day. Digital networks and mobiles evolved from getting a luxury to an absolute necessity for most men and women, which includes our youngsters who turned to such devices for their fundamental educational wants. Students missed out (and are nevertheless missing) on quite a few vital months of their research due to the onset of the pandemic and a lot of schools took efficient actions to organize virtual classrooms to continue with the research. To say the least, we learnt that the virtual way of carrying out issues is right here to keep, which would be partially retained in the post-Covid occasions and would only improve from thereon.
However, this is all taking place in the occasions when a important aspect of our population in rural locations and even in cities do not personal a smartphone or have any sort of world wide web connectivity or medium to acquire access to several on the internet applications. It is right here that we see a important chance for the Government to invest in and bring in a revolutionary adjust at the grassroot level as digital access to on the internet applications has develop into a necessity. At this juncture, we have to make a decision whether or not to move on to the new order of carrying out issues alone or to take each and every and each and every particular person, specially the young youngsters along with us, even though we move forward to a digital era. For this objective, spending budget can offer you tax rewards to several organizations, businesses and employers to take meaningful actions in this path by delivering their personnel and workers, specially these obtaining low wages, with world wide web-enabled devices for their use and for their residences, which can also be applied for their children’s education.
(SR Patnaik is a Partner & Head – Taxation at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas and Rashi Gupta is an Associate at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas. The views expressed by the autors are their personal)