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All eyes are on Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman as she gets to roll out her second Budget on February 1.

While the main focus is to spur economic growth, India Inc bosses feel certain initiatives in this year's Budget will help various sectors like food, culture & art, real estate, fintech and automobile. Several suggestions like boosting 'Make In India' in order to generate employment, reviving consumer demand and reintroducing the subvention scheme have also been doing the rounds.

As the day nears, here are some suggestions from top business leaders.

The Government should build on its recent push towards sustainability by prioritising the growth of the Electric Vehicle ecosystem. This can be done by promoting the creation of a strong and well-connected charging infrastructure on a pan-India level, promoting the setting up of EV battery capacity in the country and incentivising the adoption of EVs, especially for public transport buses, fleet operator cars and two- and three-wheelers.

The road connectivity must also be improved between major urban centres and tier-2/3 regions to bolster the growth of the travel and tourism sector.

In order to generate employment, the Budget should consider further incentives for boosting 'Make In India', and look into new mechanisms to prevent whole-sale dumping of goods by many countries into India, specifically in the area of solar energy.

Given the deceleration in economic growth, the FM may be compelled to look at measures both for immediate impact and long-term growth. The Budget will have to play a fine balancing act between managing the deficit and providing a boost to flagging economic growth. Also, India's ease of doing business ranking improved last year from 77th to 63rd. The Government needs to push ahead with sustained regulatory reforms to provide a conducive business environment.

The 2020 Budget allocation for the food industry is going to be critical, mainly due to the removal of the input tax credit on food sold in restaurants and workplaces. This step has negatively impacted the agricultural economy, ultimately having an adverse reaction to the food services industry which is a $10 billion-economy that backs $7 billion of agriculture produces. It has largely resulted in a disorganised industry, creating a lopsided structure of the entire sector as previously there was service tax and GST that claimed to have an input tax credit. The removal of Input Tax Credit and replacing it with flat-tax took away the core promise of GST, that is to eliminate the cash economy and to make sure the business of the companies help meet the expectations of the Government in ensuring transparency in the transactions.

Furthermore, it is worse when it comes to food services provider or organised caterer of any sort. When the customer is billed, he or she can claim ITC on that purchase but the service provider cannot as that is considered as a restaurant. Due to this, while the restaurants are hiking up the prices to compensate for the loss of ITC, food service providers are left high and dry. As a consequence, it reflects negatively towards the motive of helping bring about an organisational approach to agriculture produces and streamline the process. We remain optimistic that the decision of bringing back the input tax credit will be considered under the cognisance and some change is hopeful. It is also important that more focus is given to the agricultural produce so that the area substantially gets highly streamlined. The need to spur private investment and therefore to have a more predictable tax regime which can allow us to kick start our acquisitions in India is mandatory. The industry is looking forward to a revised and much predictable tax regime along with the reintroduction of the input tax credit on food sales to streamline the GST in the sector.

With the increasing demand for online purchasing, more and more businesses are moving to e-store from brick and mortar stores. e-Commerce has also revolutionised the way companies are doing business. The Government should make GST obligations for both offline and online traders same to provide more clarity on policy guidelines pertaining to eCommerce.

Looking at it as a major opportunity, the Government should look to spend higher on infrastructure and rural programs, and focus on tax cuts to boost personal consumption.

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