‘More airports in Tier 2&3 cities, new rail corridors, infra, exports on rise’

With the focus on making India ‘Viksit Bharat’ by 2047, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the interim budget and said, “Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities will have more airports,, there will be 11% increase in overall infrastructure expenditure. Exports will be doubled to ₹1-lakh crore rupees, measures will be taken to expand India’s railway infra, three major railway economic corridors including energy, mineral and cement corridor, a port connectivity corridor and a high traffic density corridor, were announced. “Railway projects have been identified under the PM Gati Shakti Yojana for enabling multi-modal connectivity. These will improve logistics efficiency and reduce costs. Decongestion of high traffic corridors will result in improving operations, which in turn would result in safety and higher travel speeds for passengers. These corridors, along with dedicated freight corridors, will accelerate our GDP and reduce logistic costs. Finance Minister also said that the government is focused on more comprehensive ‘governance, development, performance’ – termed as ‘GDP’. Finance Minister announced, “We have taken a number of steps in Customs to facilitate international trade. As a result, the import release time declined by 47 per cent to 71 hours at Inland Container Depots, by 28 per cent to 44 hours at air cargo complexes and by 27 per cent to 85 hours at seaports, over the last four years since 2019, when the National Time Release Studies were first started,” she added. Also, By unifying the tax system, she said, “The GST has reduced the compliance burden on trade and industry. As per a recent survey, 94% of industry leaders view the transition to GST as largely positive. She adds that the biggest beneficiary is the consumer as reduction in logistics costs and taxes has helped bring down prices.” Focusing on GST, Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman said, “The recently announced India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor is a strategic and economic game changer for India and others. In the words of Hon’ble Prime Minister, the corridor “will become the basis of world trade for hundreds of years to come, and history will remember that this corridor was initiated on Indian soil.”