Budget Expectation Quote by Ravi Kunwar, VP and CEO, HMD India and APAC and Bimal Khandelwal, CEO, STT GDC India
1. Ravi Kunwar, VP and CEO, HMD India and APAC: As India prepares for the Union Budget 2026, we urge the government to extend the smartphone PLI scheme beyond March 2026 and introduce a strengthened PLI 2.0 with enhanced incentives of up to 6% on incremental sales. This will be critical in order to sustain India’s projected $75 billion in mobile production and over $30 billion in exports by FY26, while building on the 1.33 million jobs generated under the Make in India initiative.
Going forward, policy interventions should further reinforce Make in India through incentives for local manufacturing, raw material subsidies, export support, investments in R&D, AI-driven innovation, and skill development.
Parallelly, we also request a focused allocation toward multimodal logistics infrastructure including rail corridors, roads, warehousing, logistics parks, and power subsidies. This step can significantly reduce logistics costs, currently estimated at 7.9% of GDP, while streamlining supply chains and component imports. Such targeted measures will drive in the direction of deeper manufacturing commitments, strengthen supply-chain resilience, and firmly position India as a globally competitive and sustainable technology export hub.
2.Bimal Khandelwal, CEO, STT GDC India: As India accelerates its digital and AI ambitions, we are expecting the upcoming Union Budget to focus on three critical enablers:
- Elevating data centers from infrastructure status to actually treating them as an End-to-End National Digital Infrastructure with coherent policies on power access, renewable integration, land availability and faster time-bound approvals across central, state and local authorities
- strengthening the country’s power transmission backbone and providing policy certainty for renewable energy adoption at scale.
- Given the central role of digital infrastructure in India’s economic and strategic ambitions, these enablers will be critical to sustaining long-term growth and strengthening India’s global competitiveness.
