Budgetary Boost to Deep Tech Innovations & Entrepreneurship

Honourable Union Finance Minister, Ms. Nirmala Sitharaman delivered the Interim Budget 2024 Speech today. The comprehensive text of the Finance Minister’s speech is accessible here. In this blog, we curate excerpts from her speech that specifically focus on Science, Technology, and Innovation in India:

Research and Innovation for catalyzing growth, employment and development

Prime Minister Shastri gave the slogan of “Jai Jawan Jai Kisan”. Prime Minister Vajpayee made that “Jai Jawan Jai Kisan Jai Vigyan”. Prime Minister Modi has furthered that to “Jai Jawan Jai Kisan Jai Vigyan and Jai Anusandhan”, as innovation is the foundation of development.

For our tech savvy youth, this will be a golden era. 
A corpus of rupees one lakh crore will be established with
fifty-year interest free loan. The corpus will provide long-term financing or refinancing with long tenors and low or nil interest rates. This will encourage the private sector to scale up research and innovation significantly in sunrise domains. We need to have programmes that combine the powers of our youth and technology.

A new scheme will be launched for strengthening 
deep-tech technologies for defence purposes and expediting ‘atmanirbharta’.

Technological Changes

New age technologies and data are changing the lives of people and businesses. They are also enabling new economic opportunities and facilitating provision of high-quality services at affordable prices for all, including those at ‘bottom of the pyramid’. Opportunities for India at the global level are expanding. India is showing solutions through innovation and entrepreneurship of its people.

Green Energy

Towards meeting our commitment for ‘net-zero’ by 2070, the following measures will be taken.

Viability gap funding will be provided for harnessing offshore wind energy potential for initial capacity of one giga-watt.

Coal gasification and liquefaction capacity of 100 MT will be set up by 2030. This will also help in reducing imports of natural gas, methanol, and ammonia.

Phased mandatory blending of compressed biogas (CBG) in compressed natural gas (CNG) for transport and piped natural gas (PNG) for domestic purposes will be mandated.

Financial assistance will be provided for procurement of biomass aggregation machinery to support collection.

Electric Vehicle Ecosystem

Our Government will expand and strengthen the e-vehicle ecosystem by supporting manufacturing and charging infrastructure. Greater adoption of e-buses for public transport networks will be encouraged through payment security mechanism.