Ashvin Parekh, Partner, National Leader-Global Financial Services , Ernst & Young

MAT has just moved from 10% to 15% - so it s not too serious but certainly for inducing investment – that is encouraging investment – one would have expected perhaps a revision on the lower side. That was the market expectation. So everybody was surprised by the 10% to 15% kind of a journey basically. We thought that there was going to be more amount of encouragement to let us say corporates in investing in their capacity building and for growth. Now the amity of 15% negates that to certain extent.

One or two things he has talked about and he has done also. FBT was certainly one of them. He has admitted that the administrative cost involved in the management of FBT is far more than the amount of revenue he is collecting by way of that. So he has done that and then thereafter he dwelled more on Saral-II and the fact that it is going to bring in a lot of technology into Saral-II.

So I suppose compared to the direction or compared to some broad announcements that he wanted to make and the actual action plan I thought there was more of talk and there wasn’t too much of actual substance and in just that part but the fact that in the next four years he has promised to examine and make it more simpler, he has also indicated there are revenue leakages around a lot of exemptions to the corporates and it is going to really rationalize those. So these are some good directional statements he made in fact today.

The direction saying that banking and insurance will continue to be in the public domain is a very large statement quite clearly – it sets out the direction and nothing else. Now you know what you are going to do with those seven banks who already exhausted that 51% limit, now we at least know. So the direction is well set out I would say.