Budget 2019, the first major event after Prime Minister Narendra Modi led NDA came back with an enormous mandate, is due to be announced on 5 July 2019 by Nirmala Sitharaman, India’s first woman full-time finance minister. Naturally, the expectations run high in the IT industry, which is expecting the Budget 2019 to give the much needed boost to the slowing economy.
The startup companies especially expects major steps be taken to boost the ecosystem in India. Measures that will lead to growth of the economy and increase in jobs are also being expected. While expectations from the Fintech industry was covered earlier this week, here is what industry leaders and startups expect from the budget 2019.
Budget 2019 and Cyber security
Need National Cyber Security Strategy – Deepak Maheshwari, Director of Government Affairs, Symantec, India, ASEAN & China
With the ubiquitous hyper connectivity and horizontal integration of technology across all walks of life, it is not at all surprising that cyber security threats featured amongst the top four risks by the World Economic Forum in its recent report. India is neither immune nor an outlier to this global phenomenon. To foster trust in technology and bolster overall security, it is imperative that India enhances its cyber security readiness and posture, especially in the critical infrastructures including governance, banking and financial services, energy, telecom and smart cities. The budget should mandate setting aside 10% of the respective technology budgets for every government project exclusively for cyber security, as per the recommendations of the NASSCOM Task Force set up in response to the Prime Minister’s behest. Besides enactment of data protection, we need a comprehensive National Cyber Security Strategy, both enriched via public consultations; and aligned with global best practices.
Push to Cyber Safe India – Deepak Gupta, CTO and Co-founder, LoginRadius
From this year’s budget, we anticipate a strong push to ‘Cyber Safe India’ initiative, especially when it comes to privacy and consent management. With the increasing digital transformation, it’s necessary to have a process that oversees how companies save citizen data. The focus of such a framework should be cybersecurity and cyber frauds so as to ensure that organisations prioritise data protection. The impetus will help position India as a global hub for providing cyber security solutions; putting more emphasis on data privacy and security of Indian identities. The Indian citizen data should ideally reside in India. Government has certainly put India on a digital innovation fast track, A collaborative framework for the public and the private sector will help create 100% digitally enabled services ensuring secure and seamless citizen interactions across service managed by new technologies such as IoT, AI, and analytics.
Data Privacy and India Citizens – Saurabh Saxena, Country Director, Micro Focus India
The 2nd term of the Government at helm ensures a perfect opportunity to rehabilitate the economy for sustainable development in India. India is heading towards becoming a knowledge economy. With the rapid digital transformation happening across industries, the cybersecurity concerns have also risen significantly. It is hence imperative for the government to ensure data privacy of Indian citizens, so that they are truly empowered to use IT infrastructure and e-governance services. We look forward to collaborating with the government to help our nation in their digital transformation journey. As such, we hope to have policies around Information Technology that would provide the industry with certainty and enable them to invest in long-term strategy. Moreover, we hope to have tax friendly policies that would contribute significantly to the country’s GDP, and owing to the huge workforce and India’s potential, we are confident that the government will come up with innovative reforms.
