Budget lays blueprint for digital ecosystem

Budget 2026 is an intentional and ambitious one — From manufacturing growth to services supremacy, from technology consumption to AI-powered transformation.

- ARUNDHATI BHATTACHARYA

This is the blueprint for a $7 trillion economy built on intelligence, not just scale.The strategic architecture is multifaceted. The tax holiday until 2047 for cloud services isn’t merely a fiscal incentive — it’s a masterstroke in data sovereignty that transforms India into a global cloud hub. By ensuring Indian data stays in India while attracting an estimated $50 billion in data centre investments by 2030, the government has created irresistible economics for what could position us as the cloud services provider for emerging markets.