Budget 2025 promises 'sabka vikas' of economy—from agriculture to AI
The overarching theme of Union Budget 2025-26 was inclusive development, along with a thrust on emerging segments like deeptech and artificial intelligence.
'Sabka Vikas' (development for all) was the dominant theme of the 2025-26 Union Budget as it touched all the important cogs of the Indian economy—from agriculture to artificial intelligence.
“We see the next five years as a unique opportunity to realise ‘Sabka Vikas’, stimulating balanced growth of all regions,” Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in her Budget speech.
The FM stressed inclusive development through accelerated growth, invigorating private sector investments, uplifting household sentiments, and enhancing the spending power of India’s rising middle class.
The middle class saw the biggest benefit as the finance minister proposed no income tax up to Rs 12.75 lakh under the new regime.
The Budget outlined the four powerful engines in the nation’s journey of development: agriculture, MSME, investment, and exports.
Sitharaman spoke about the holistic development of the agriculture sector where the focus extended from enhancing agricultural productivity to sustainable practices and making credit available to the farmers.
Similarly, the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) were also given a big thrust with proposals for increased credit and improving their competitiveness in the global market.
The Budget also gave enough impetus to newer areas like AI, electric vehicles, startup ecosystem, as well as space technology. There are plans to set up newer centres of excellence for AI.
“Given our commitment to climate-friendly development, the Mission will also support clean tech manufacturing. This will aim to improve domestic value addition and build our ecosystem for solar PV cells, EV batteries, motors and controllers, electrolysers, wind turbines, very high voltage transmission equipment and grid-scale batteries,” the finance minister said.
The Budget gave a big boost to the startup ecosystem with a fresh Rs 10,000 crore fund of fun, and a new fund for deeptech startups. “To implement the private sector driven research, development and innovation initiative announced in the July Budget, I am now allocating Rs 20,000 crore. A deep tech Fund of Funds will also be explored to catalyse the next-generation startups as a part of this initiative,” Sitharaman announced in her Budget speech.
In addition, the gig workers also found a mention in the Budget as the finance minister proposed health coverage as well as registration on the e-Shram portal for this segment.
Space technology found its mention in the Union Budget as it proposed a national geospatial mission to develop foundational geospatial infrastructure and data. This will be used to facilitate the modernisation of land records, urban planning, and design of infrastructure projects.
On the taxation front, the Sitharaman said, “I reaffirm the commitment of the tax department to “trust first, scrutinise later. I also propose to introduce the new income-tax bill next week.”
The Budget promises to strengthen trust-based economic governance and take transformational measures to enhance ‘ease of doing business’.
The proposals in the Budget include: personal Income tax reforms with a special focus on the middle class, rationalisation of TDS/TCS for easing difficulties, encouraging voluntary compliance, reducing compliance burden, ease of doing business, employment, and investment
Edited by Kanishk Singh