“Budget 2026-27 is envisioning India as a future global hub for cloud and AI infrastructure, especially by the offer of a 20 year tax holiday till 2047 for foreign companies using local data centres. This will certainly speed up investments in data centres and bring in global hyperscalers to run their workloads in India. Although this is good for physical infrastructure, the matter of India’s digital economy is raised: Are we making a cloud leadership or just hosting it? Without giving equal attention to Indian cloud service providers and platforms, India risks becoming mainly a reseller and a hosting base for foreign providers. The real leadership in compute is not only about the things in a data centre but the control over platforms, services, and customer relationships. If the policy incentives are nice for both the global players to come and the strengthening of domestic cloud ecosystems, India can be the backbone and the brain of global compute at the same time. If not, we will be leaving value on export while we will be stuck with only infrastructure costs.”
— Ishan Talathi, CEO & Founder, CloudPe
“The Union Budget 2026 clearly reinforces the idea that India’s education transformation will succeed only when learning moves beyond screens and textbooks. While digital access is important, the real impact will come from investing in hands-on STEM infrastructure—robotics labs, AI learning spaces, and innovation-driven classrooms—especially in Tier-2 and Tier-3 schools where talent exists but exposure does not.
The Budget’s emphasis on skills, emerging technologies, and teacher enablement is a step in the right direction. However, technology investments must be matched with structured teacher training and curriculum integration; otherwise, even the best tools remain underutilised.
Practical STEM education builds problem-solving, creativity, and applied thinking—skills that directly influence employability and innovation capacity. If Budget support continues to strengthen experiential learning and school-level innovation, India can create a strong pipeline of future-ready students aligned with global technology needs.
Education is not just a social investment—it is long-term economic infrastructure, and Budget 2026 moves that conversation forward.”
— Abhineet Sharma, Founder, RoboSpecies
“Union Budget 2026 has clearly reinforced the government’s long-term commitment to infrastructure-led growth by sustaining capital expenditure across roads, urban development, housing, and large public projects. This continuity is crucial for the construction ecosystem, as predictable capex enables better planning, capacity building, and investment in modern construction practices.
That said, the next phase of infrastructure growth must focus not only on how much is spent, but on how efficiently projects are executed on ground. As project sizes and timelines become more ambitious, traditional, labour-intensive construction methods are increasingly unsustainable.
Modern formwork and scaffolding systems play a critical role in improving construction speed, structural quality, and on-site safety—three factors that directly impact project delivery and cost control. Budget 2026 presents an opportunity to accelerate this transition by encouraging mechanised construction, standardised safety norms, and support for domestic manufacturers supplying engineered construction solutions.
Streamlined payment cycles, faster project clearances, and recognition of construction productivity as a national priority can significantly improve outcomes. If India aims to build world-class infrastructure at scale, the focus must now shift from expenditure alone to productivity, safety, and execution excellence.”
— Mayank Pathak, Founder & Managing Director, Translite Formwork & Scaffolding
