Customs and excise duty rates have been amended mainly to promote Make in India.
Thus far in 2017-18, FIIs and MFs have invested Rs 198.91 billion and Rs 1,119.49 billion in the Indian equity markets. Of this, around Rs 152.46 billion has come in January alone.
To begin, the Budget has no doubt attempted to address uncertainty.
The government has provided a long-term vision.
In an online chat with Rediff.com readers, personal finance expert Anil Rego answered queries about the new tax regime announced in the Union Budget.
'The only good thing is people will not be required to maintain their medical bills and invest time in that.'
The flight arrived at Wuhan's Tianhe International Airport on Friday evening. While the official number of students to be airlifted in the two flights is not known, Indians who reached the Wuhan airport on Friday said they were told that 374 were expected to be airlifted by the Air India flight. India has taken an undertaking from the Indians travelling in the two flights that they would be quarantined for 14 days after their arrival, besides undergoing special checks at the Wuhan airport.
Paytm's secondary share sale gave an opportunity to its employees - both former and current - to liquidate their vested Esops and earn around Rs 500 crore in total.
The rally in index heavyweight ITC has boosted the sentiment across the board.
It is time to take a few macroeconomic risks to kick start the growth.
Budget has laid emphasis on enhancing expenditure in farm & rural, and social sector including healthcare, education, skill development, job creation and infrastructure
Chidambaram mocked her with a tongue-in-cheek tweet.
Rising rural distress due to back-to-back droughts have put pressure on FM to spend more on social schemes; no change in tax slabs likely
But do not expect the finance minister to fulfil all these wishes
Arun Jaitley had proposed in the Budget to double the rate of capital gains tax on debt MFs to 20%.
Some of the policy measures announced are expected to go a long way in removing current challenges on financing faced by businesses and also increasing economic activity, especially in areas of construction and manufacturing.
Increasing the duties on auto parts and putting an additional cess on petrol and diesel could drive up costs of vehicles, specially where volumes are low and localisation is not viable.
Finance minister attempts a clean-up job, keeps projected expenditure growth low.
Budget planners for now have been told to prepare with the assumption that GST will apply from April 1.
For 2017-18 and 2018-19, investors are better off focusing on the quality of measures announced in the Budget and outside it rather than on the Budget numbers themselves, says T T Ram Mohan.
The industry's reactions to the Budget have been mixed.
FM needs to convince Indians to invest more in stocks.
Ministry considering tax sops for India's first global financial centre, steps to liberalise futures and options markets.
Jaitley's fiscal arithmetic, Crisil said, is "shaky", and the scope for fiscal slippage "remains high".
At a time when major economies have increased spending, India will have to do the same.
Arun Jaitley had a tough fiscal hill to climb.
Though not a blockbuster budget it does not undermine the fact that key issues were addressed and the finance minister certainly did not under-deliver, says Vatsal Srivastava.
The obvious temptation for Mr Jaitley would be to achieve a better fiscal deficit figure than what he had promised in July.
Budget has several small steps which will boost growth
Senior bureaucrats say the government has planned a 'feel-good' Budget after the 'pain' of demonetisation.
'The clubbing of policy announcements in the Budget speech creates policy surprises.' 'Economic actors dislike policy surprises because they throw their plans off track,' points out Alok Tiwari.
The Budget may see new rural schemes and stepping up of funding towards existing programmes like MNREGA, rural housing, irrigation projects and crop insurance.
There will be a review of employee compensation arrangement in the light of the new rules.
Mohandas Pai took part in an hour-long chat on rediff.com
The 30-share Sensex ended up 8 points at 27,508 and the 50-share Nifty closed 1 point higher at 8,284.
Is the Budget sufficiently prudent? It probably is but at the cost of substantial under-provisioning for the many grand sounding schemes announced in it, says Nitin Desai.
This Budget signals a shift from a hand-out to a hand-up economy.
Eminent business journalist and author Tamal Bandyopadhyay discussed Budget with rediff.com readers on Tuesday.
This is not the first time Trai has been accused of bias; and, in my memory, never have such charges of bias been leveled against any other regulatory body, says Rahul Khullar.
