Washington

Finance Minister Sitharaman on Feb 1 proposed a sharp increase in expenditure on infra, doubling of healthcare spending and raising the cap on foreign investment in insurance in her Budget for the next fiscal in a bid to pull India’s pandemic-hit economy out the woods.

“Overall, I thought it was a great budget. Markets have reacted,” Mukesh Aghi, president of US-India Strategic and Partnership Forum (USISPF), said. “I think they (US firms) are excited. They feel for the first time in many, many years you have a budget which provides less government fine-tuning… It is a clearly defined budget which attracts a lot of International Investment,” Aghi said, reflecting on the feedback the USISPF has been receiving from its members.

American firms, he said, see an opportunity for them in India’s healthcare sector, as there has been a substantial increase in the budget.

Same is the case in investment in the infrastructure sector, which has generated a large interest among the US companies, Aghi said.

The government has proposed a budget outlay of Rs 2,23,846 crore for health and well-being in
2021-2022, an increase of 137 per cent from the previous year, with Rs 35,000 crore earmarked for COVID- 19 vaccine in the upcoming fiscal.

The US firms have been buying assets in India, now they can be more aggressive, he said.