The sentiment cuts across real estate, finance, manufacturing, startups, digital services, education, climate markets and consumer industries, where leaders argue that India’s growth constraints are now less about demand creation and more about friction in translating policy intent into on-ground outcomes.
Housing and urban development take centre stage
Housing has emerged as one of the most consequential themes in the pre-Budget discourse, reflecting its multiplier effect on employment, consumption, credit growth and infrastructure creation. While residential demand has remained resilient—particularly in mid-income, premium and emerging city markets—industry participants say policy frameworks have struggled to keep pace with price realities and execution complexity.
Parveen Jain, President, NAREDCO, reiterates that the absence of full industry and infrastructure status for real estate continues to limit access to long-term, lower-cost capital, even as the sector expands into rental housing, senior living and mixed-use developments.
A key concern repeatedly highlighted is the ₹45 lakh affordable housing cap, which developers and platforms say is increasingly disconnected from urban market conditions. Akshay Taneja, CEO, TDI Infrastructure, and Ashish Narain Agarwal, Founder & Managing Director, PropertyPistol, note that affordability-linked incentives lose relevance when policy thresholds do not reflect land, construction and compliance costs in metros and growth corridors.
Execution delays further compound these pressures. Samarth Setia, Founder, Rezio.ai, points out that approval delays create a “time tax” through interest costs and rework, which eventually gets passed on to homebuyers. This has strengthened industry calls for time-bound single-window approvals, land-record digitisation and regulatory predictability.
Shift towards Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities
Unlike earlier cycles dominated by metros, the current housing upcycle is increasingly driven by Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities and peripheral urban corridors. Infrastructure investments—expressways, airports, metro rail and industrial nodes—are reshaping demand across Noida, Gurugram’s outer belts, Sonipat, Hyderabad and other emerging centres.
Rohit Kishore, CEO, Hero Realty, highlights how infrastructure such as the Noida International Airport and expressway connectivity is driving end-user demand, supported by inflows from corporates, data centres and manufacturing units. Abhay Mishra, President & CEO, Jindal Realty, similarly points to Tier-II cities as the new growth engine for housing, provided urban infrastructure spending keeps pace.
From a market advisory perspective, Vishal Raheja, Founder & Managing Director, InvestoXpert Advisors, flags that regulatory complexity, fragmented land records and prolonged approvals continue to delay execution and affect buyer confidence in these high-potential regions.
Household incomes and credit delivery in focus
Beyond housing, easing pressure on household finances has emerged as another major expectation from Budget 2026. While the new tax regime has raised slab thresholds, inflation has steadily compressed real disposable incomes, particularly for salaried professionals.
Adhil Shetty, CEO, BankBazaar, notes that revisiting tax structures in line with inflation could free up savings and consumption, while deeper investments in digital public infrastructure—such as DigiLocker, the Account Aggregator framework and agentless video KYC—can materially reduce friction and cost in accessing loans and insurance.
From a broader business perspective, Pyush Lohia, Director, Lohia Worldspace, stresses that policy stability and infrastructure-led capital expenditure will be critical to sustaining consumer confidence and employment amid global uncertainty.
Manufacturing and MSMEs flag cost-of-entry barriers
India’s manufacturing ambitions remain strong, but MSMEs continue to face high setup costs due to fragmented industrial land, duplicated infrastructure and slow approvals.
Yogesh Bhatia, Managing Director & CEO, LML Realty, says reducing factory setup costs—even by 15–25 percent—could significantly improve manufacturing viability, formal employment and compliance, particularly in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities. Industry players are therefore pushing for plug-and-play industrial parks, shared infrastructure and standardised single-window systems.
Consumer and beverage manufacturers echo similar concerns. Paritosh Ladhani, Joint Managing Director, SLMG Beverages and Sincere Developers, points to GST rationalisation, especially for sustainable packaging, along with measures to boost rural incomes and consumption as key growth levers.
Startups seek predictability over proliferation
For startups and investors, the emphasis is firmly on procedural certainty rather than new schemes. Rathnakar Samavedam, Investment Director & Managing Partner, Hyderabad Angles Fund, argues that unresolved legacy angel tax disputes and delayed loss recognition continue to weigh on investor confidence.
Early-stage founders from IndieVisual—including Vineet Khunger, Co-founder & Head of Finance/Admin/Marketing, Prashanth Naik, Co-founder & Head of Tech/Creative, and Prashant Pavithran, Co-founder & Head of Sales—highlight cash-flow stress from delayed GST input credit and TDS refunds, particularly for companies with long R&D cycles.
Digital, AI and GCC ecosystems push for clarity
As AI and data-driven platforms move from experimentation to core business infrastructure, industry expectations are shifting towards scale-ready policy frameworks.
Akshay Chhabra, Chairman & Managing Director, 1Point1 Solutions, and Anand Bhadkamkar, Group CFO, LS Digital, underline the need for R&D incentives, data governance clarity and domestic digital ecosystem support to enable AI-led productivity gains.
In the GCC space, Lalit Ahuja, Founder & CEO, ANSR, stresses that predictable tax and GST treatment—particularly for cross-border services, IP creation and R&D—is essential to sustain India’s competitiveness as a global capability hub.
Education, climate and emerging asset classes
Outside traditional sectors, long-term capacity building has gained prominence. Gitesh Gupta, CEO, Aimlay, highlights the need for sustained investment in research infrastructure, scholarships and doctoral funding aligned with NEP 2020 to position India as a global knowledge hub.
In climate markets, Yashodhan Ramteke, Chief Executive Officer & Director, EcoGuard Global, cautions that as India transitions to a compliance-driven carbon market, registries, MRV systems and digital trust layers must be recognised as core financial infrastructure to ensure transparency and global acceptance.
New asset classes are also drawing attention. Rishabh Periwal, Senior Vice President, Pioneer Urban Land & Infrastructure Ltd., points to senior living as a structurally driven housing segment, while Manoj Dhanotiya, Founder & CEO, Micro Mitti, flags the opportunity for India to lead in tokenised real estate through clear regulatory and tax frameworks.
A quieter but consequential Budget
Across sectors—from dairy – be it K. Rathnam, Whole Time Director & CEO, Milky Mist Dairy Food Limited to hospitality—as voiced by Sanjay Vazirani, Chairman & Managing Director, Foodlink F&B Holdings (India) Limited to retail tech—as cited by Ayush Jhawar, Founder & CEO, Genefied to infrastructure digitisation as eluded by(Pete Nicholson, Senior Vice President, Nemetschek Group and to luxury housing explained by Navdeep Sardana, Founder, Whiteland Corporation—the underlying message is consistent.
Industry is not asking for aggressive fiscal expansion. Instead, it is calling for updated policy assumptions, faster execution and regulatory coherence that reduce hidden costs and unlock long-term capital.
If Budget 2026 addresses these structural frictions—quietly but decisively—it could play a defining role in shaping India’s next phase of sustainable, broad-based growth.
