A Strategic Blueprint For India’s Services-Led, Technology-Driven Growth

The Union Budget 2026– 27 sets out a clear vision for India’s growth, with its strategic priorities highlighting the government’s long-term direction. Anchored around three Kartavya—accelerating economic growth, fulfilling aspirations through jobs and skills, and ensuring inclusive development—the Budget places services, technology and talent at the centre of India’s journey towards Viksit Bharat. From a CFO’s perspective, this clarity is critical, offering enterprises a roadmap of where public investment, reforms and institutional support are headed—and where long-term private capital can be deployed with confidence.

Growth with Stability

India’s ability to sustain economic growth of around 7%, despite a challenging global environment, provides the macroeconomic foundation for this Budget. Equally important is the emphasis on fiscal discipline and long-term capacity building rather than short-term stimulus. This reduces uncertainty around inflation, interest rates and currency volatility—key variables influencing enterprise investment decisions. The social context is equally significant. With nearly 25 crore people moving out of multidimensional poverty over the past decade, the policy focus is shifting from access to aspiration. Strengthening household purchasing power, productivity and quality employment expands domestic markets and broadens the talent pool.

Services at the Core

A defining feature of Budget 2026–27 is the explicit recognition of the services sector as a primary engine of growth and employment. The ambition to capture 10% of global services exports by 2047 reflects India’s confidence in its capabilities across IT services, Global Capability Centres (GCCs), digital platforms and knowledge-led industries. For GCCs and technologydriven enterprises, this is a critical signal. Services are no longer a supporting outcome of growth—they are the growth strategy itself, driving exports, productivity and high-quality employment. India is increasingly seen as a centre for innovation, engineering and strategic decision-making, not merely delivery.

Employment, Youth and Talent

Employment generation, particularly for youth, lies at the heart of the Budget. The proposal to establish a ‘HighPowered Education to Employment and Enterprise Standing Committee’ is a structural intervention. Its mandate to identify high-growth services sub-sectors, assess AI’s impact on jobs, and recommend AI-enabled skilling and job-matching frameworks aligns closely with enterprise workforce challenges. Beyond IT, the Budget widens the employment lens to tourism, healthcare, sports and the creative economy. Initiatives such as upskilling 10,000 tourist guides, developing 15 archaeological sites, adding 100,000 allied health professionals, and training 1.5 lakh caregivers diversify formal employment pathways while building structured skills ecosystems.

Digital Infrastructure and Productivity

The Budget’s focus on data centres and cloud infrastructure positions India as a global digital hub. A tax holiday till 2047 for foreign cloud providers using India-based data centres, along with safe harbour provisions for Indian entities, aims to attract hyperscale investments while ensuring domestic value capture. Coupled with continued support for AI, quantum technologies and India Semiconductor Mission 2.0, the direction is clear: future competitiveness will be shaped by productivity and capability density, not cost arbitrage alone.

Looking Ahead

Union Budget 2026–27 sends a clear long-term signal. India’s growth will be services-led, technology-enabled and talent-driven, underpinned by fiscal discipline and institutional reform. For global enterprises and GCC leaders, India is positioning itself as a durable strategic hub. For CFOs, the opportunity—and responsibility—lies in aligning capital allocation, risk frameworks and workforce investments with this multi-decade vision. This Budget is less about annual allocations and more about enabling sustainable, capability-led growth.

Jagriti Kumar is the CFO, NLB Services