S Gopalakrishnan, CEO, Infosys Technologies

Clearly the abolish of fringe benefit tax (FBT) will be beneficial to the IT Industry both from an administrative and overhead perspective as well as the actual numbers. Secondly he has clarified that he will remove excise duty on packet software, the streamlining, and the refund of service tax on overseas services. That is again something which the IT industry will benefit from. On the employees side raising the personal exemption limits, removal of the surcharges up to 10% all these would be positive for the employees. On the third item I would say is the investment in education because the IT sector does require talent, require supply of talented people and the investment in IIT, NIIT etc would be positive for the IT industry in the medium to long term. The domestic IT industry will benefit from investment into Unique identification (UID), automation of the employment exchanges. I think that is a good indication of increase spending in domestic IT projects.

Right now the extension is for one more year. The impact of that is limited because most Software Technology Parks of India (STPIs) would have come out of the tax holiday so it is limited but it is a small indication that the government is still looking at this industry favourably.