Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday presented the Interim Union Budget 2024-25 in Parliament. Being a vote-on-account, the Budget was a no-surprise Budget. The direct and indirect tax rates remain unchanged. Here are the key takeaways from the Budget:
The capital expenditure outlay for the next year is being increased by 11.1 per cent to Rs 11,11,111 crore, which would be 3.4 per cent of the GDP.
The scheme of 50-year interest-free loan for capital expenditure to states will be continued this year with a total outlay of Rs1.3 lakh crore. A provision of Rs 75,000 crore as a 50-year interest-free loan is proposed this year to support the milestone-linked reforms of Viksit Bharat by the state governments.
Referring to the fiscal consolidation, as announced in her Budget Speech for 2021-22, to reduce the fiscal deficit below 4.5 per cent by 2025-26, Sitharaman said the fiscal deficit in 2024-25 is estimated to be 5.1 per cent of GDP, adhering to that path.
Sitharaman also stated that the gross and net market borrowings through dated securities during 2024-25 are estimated at Rs 14.13 and 11.75 lakh crore, respectively, and both will be less than that in 2023-24.
Sithraman said Prime Minister Narendra Modi firmly believes and focused
on four major castes. They are ‘Garib’ (Poor), ‘Mahilayen’ (Women), ‘Yuva’ (Youth) and ‘Annadata’ (Farmer). Their welfare is the government’s highest priority.
In her Budget Speech 2024, The finance minister said, “We are working to make India a ‘Viksit Bharat’ by 2047. For achieving that goal, we need to improve people’s capability and empower them."
The government will pay utmost attention to make the eastern region and its people a powerful driver of India’s growth, PM Awas Yojana (Grameen) is close to achieving the target of three crore houses and two crore more houses will be taken up in the next five years to meet the requirement arising from increase in the number of families. Similarly, through rooftop solarisation, one crore households will be enabled to obtain up to 300 units free electricity every month.
Sitharaman announced that for our tech-savvy youth, this will be a golden era, as a corpus of rupees one lakh crore will be established with 50-year interest-free loan.
She said, “We are working to make India a ‘Viksit Bharat’ by 2047. For achieving that goal, we need to improve people’s capability and empower them."
For railways, three major economic railway corridor programmes will be implemented-energy, mineral and cement corridors, port connectivity corridors, and high traffic density corridors.
For the aviation sector, the number of airports have doubled to 149 and today 517 new routes are carrying 1.3 crore passengers. Indian carriers have pro-actively placed orders for over 1,000 new aircrafts.
Withdrawal of outstanding direct tax demand
The Interim Budget proposes to withdraw such outstanding direct tax demands up to Rs 25,000 pertaining to the period up to financial year 2009-10 and up to Rs 10,000 for financial years 2010-11 to 2014-15. This is expected to benefit about a crore taxpayers.
Direct tax collections trebled
Appreciating the taxpayers for their support, Smt. Sitharaman said that over the last 10 years the direct tax collections have more than trebled and the return filers swelled to 2.4 times.
GST reduced compliance burden
Sitharaman said that GST has reduced the compliance burden on trade and industry by unifying the highly fragmented indirect tax regime in India. Mentioning about a recent survey conducted by a leading consulting firm, she said that 94 per cent of industry leaders view the transition to GST as largely positive.
Laying of White Paper
On the status of Indian economy, the Union Minister said that in 2014 the responsibility to mend the economy step by step and to put the governance systems in order was enormous, which she said was done by the government sucessfully following its strong belief of ‘nation-first’.
Tax Benefits For Startups
The government has announced tax benefits for start-ups and investments made by sovereign wealth or pension funds. “certain tax benefits to start-ups and investments made by sovereign wealth or pension funds as also tax exemption on certain income of some IFSC units are expiring on 31.03.2024. To provide continuity in taxation, I propose to extend the date to 31.03.2025," she said.
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