February 26 2016, 14.46 PM IST || Pocket News Alert
1) All encompassing
This year’s budget needs to walk the talk and show real execution towards the government’s intent of making it “easier to do business in India” as well as towards “developing India as an innovation hub” for India and the world. Towards fulfilling the Digital India vision, we also expect that this year’s budget will address anomalies like differential duty structure for PCs as provided to other compute devices.
We also hope that the budget relooks at procurement norms to focus on quality & cost based procurement and brings in a single independent authority to ease Digital India implementation. There is a dire need for a strong and well-structured innovation agenda/policy for Digital India and Make in India to be a reality. We hope that this budget incentivizes organizations who’ve already set up innovation labs, R&D hubs (including captive R&D) and manufacturing facilities to ‘Innovate for or in India’ while continuing to foster the start-up ecosystem.
2) Hardware Specific
We believe that PCs are important tool of productivity, learning and development and that it is critical to provide consumers a wider choice of affordable computing devices for their specific needs. In line with this, we hope that this year’s budget will extend duty incentive schemes given to mobile phones and tablets to all the ITA goods including PCs which is critical for empowering every citizen with technology. Several IT hardware players have their manufacturing facilities in India that are currently under-utilized due to weak demand. The suggested duty differential will spur the domestic consumption leading to increased production, thereby boosting manufacturing by these players and creating a winning proposition for the government on ‘Make in India’ especially because this can be done without extending any capital support or incentives (e.g MSIPs) since the facilities already exist.
Spokesperson Profile:
Debjani Ghosh is vice president in the Sales and Marketing Group and managing director for South Asia at Intel Corporation. Based in India, she is responsible for establishing new growth areas for Intel in the South Asian region. She works with governments and industry in these countries to establish policies and initiatives that help accelerate the adoption of technology in the region, especially as an enabler of inclusive growth and development.
Ghosh joined Intel in 1996 as a marketing communications executive charged with developing a consumer marketing program in India. Subsequently, she set up and managed Intel’s education programs across the Asia Pacific region. Before assuming her current role, she had served as Southeast Asia marketing manager, as country manager for Malaysia, and most recently, as director for Southeast Asia.
Before joining Intel, she spent 3 years with Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency.
Ghosh is a member of the Executive Council of National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM )which is the premier organization that represents and sets the tone for public policy for the Indian software industry. She is also the President of the Manufacturers’ Association for Information Technology (MAIT) and the chair of the IT Committee at the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). She is also a trustee of the NASSCOM Foundation. In 2015, Fortune India ranked her as the 14th most powerful woman in business in India.
Ghosh holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Osmania University in Hyderabad, India, and an MBA degree in marketing from S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai, India.
About Intel
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) is a world leader in computing innovation. The company designs and builds the essential technologies that serve as the foundation for the world’s computing devices. As a leader in corporate responsibility and sustainability, Intel also manufactures the world’s first commercially available “conflict-free” microprocessors. Additional information about Intel is available at newsroom.intel.com and blogs.intel.com, and about Intel’s conflict-free efforts at conflictfree.intel.com.
