Last year's budget witnessed a 7.3 per cent increase in higher education compared to that of 3 per cent increase in school education. Clearly, higher education was starkly focused in the budget of 2016.
On the expectations for education and training sector from budget 2017, Rahul K Patwardhan, CEO, NIIT Limited said, "Although there has been lot of focus on skills and training, we expect some tax relief for the education and training sector in this budget. We expect that the government will introduce measures to ensure a level playing field for the highly regulated Indian online education and training companies, against the global players who are entering the Indian market aggressively in an unregulated manner as far as Indian taxation regime is concerned."
Elaborating on the corporate budget, Patwardhan further added, "The Government, has already announced phased reduction of Corporate Tax rates from 30 per cent to 25 per cent, and we expect some announcement in the ensuing Union budget to this effect. Tax regime is one of the significant considerations for Multinational Enterprises to set up their business in a particular tax jurisdiction. This would be a tremendous step from the government in respect to ease of doing business, encouraging more multinationals to expand their business in the country."
"GST is another much-awaited Indirect tax reform, which will boost the economy. As, GST has been deferred to July 1, 2017, we hope that the government should accordingly extend the date of phase wise GST provisional registration as organizations are facing issues in getting registered on GST portal. There should be firm timeline and industry should be given sufficient time for implementation since lot of modifications is required in the IT Systems. Further, specifically for Service sector there would be extra burden on compliances for multistate registrations, therefore ease of compliance should be considered i.e. centralised registration or unified registration, "said Patwardhan explaining further about GST's effect on the education sector.
