Budget 2023: What's in it for millennials and GenZ?

Nirmala Sitharaman with the Budget 2023 "bahi khata". (Image: ANI/Twitter)

The last full-year Budget of the current government by the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, is being regarded as a populous by many.  While it has something for everyone - businesses, salaried class, tribal groups, and the middle class; youth empowerment is one of the top takeaways from the Union Budget 2023.

Millenialls and Gen Z too had their hopes from the Budget 2023, But did FM Sitharaman met their expectations? Here's a break-up of what the Budget 2023 holds for millenialls and Gen Z -

Income tax slabs tweaked
The income tax rebate under the new tax regime has been increased from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 7 lakh. In addition to this, finance minister also reduced the tax slabs under the new regime to five.

Financial literacy
Government has proposed to  to skill lakhs of youth within the next 3 years under the PM Kaushal Vikas Yojna. Finance Minister said that a digital skill ecosystem will be set up under the name of Skill India Digital Platform to provide on-the-job-training to the youth and align the higher education courses with the standards of industry 4.0 for better employability.

The government also proposed SEBI to develop and regulate education in NISM and award a degrees, diplomas and certificates to boost financial literacy.

AI Boost 
The government proposed to set up 3 centres of excellence for artificial intelligence (AI) in the country and train lakhs of youth in coding, drones, AI, robotics, internet of things, to name a few, over the next three years.

Ease in filing Income Tax Returns
The finance minister said that the government aims to reduce the ITR processing time from 93 to 16 days and introduce a grievance redressal forum to ease ITR filing in the country.

A simple common-income tax return form for all taxpayers will be made available soon as well. These measures will allow more early earners to be better equipped at their tax planning and filing the ITR returns on their own.

Startup and MSME sector jobs
The government has allotted Rs 283.5 crore for the Startup India Seed Fund Scheme and extended tax holiday for startups till March 2024
MSMEs too got Rs 9000 crore corpus for revamped credit guarantee scheme to promote financial inclusion and employability growth, amidst the massive layoffs in the startup sector.

The Finance minister also had an announcement for kids and adolescents during her Budget presentation. Nirmala Sitharaman declared the setting up of a national digital library for children and adolescents for facilitating the availability of quality books across the country.

"National digital library for children and adolescents will be set up for facilitating the availability of quality books across geographies, languages, genres and levels, and device agnostic accessibility," she said.

"States will be encouraged to set up libraries for them (children) at panchayat and ward levels and provide infrastructure for accessing the national digital library's sources."

Additionally, to build a culture of reading, and to make up for pandemic-time learning loss, the National Book Trust, the Children's Book Trust, and other sources would be encouraged to provide and replenish non-curricular titles in regional languages and in English to physical libraries, the minister added.

"Collaboration with NGOs that work in literacy will also be a part of this initiative," Nirmala Sitharaman said. "To inculcate financial literacy, financial sector regulators and organisations will be encouraged to provide age-appropriate reading material to these libraries."

Read more: Budget 2023: Cigarettes to get costlier and Twitter is blowing up with memes