Dr Krishna M Ella, co-founder and executive chairman of Bharat Biotech International, a company known more for its Covaxin Covid vaccine, sees the budget as unique for the multitude of measures that, taken together, could be transformational in terms of employment generation.
Among the various worthy schemes announced in the budget by the Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Dr Ella points to measures like the proposal to set up a high-powered ‘Education to Employment and Enterprise’ standing committee to recommend measures that focus on the Services Sector as a core driver of Viksit Bharat. All with an intent to make India emerge as a global leader in services, with a 10 per cent global share in services by 2047.
Focus on services and tourism to drive job creation
In the space of tourism, he points to the focus on enhancing the last-mile and remote connectivity, and promote tourism with incentives to indigenize manufacturing of seaplanes. For this, the finance minister has announced a ‘Seaplane VGF Scheme’ to provide support for operations.
Medical value tourism and textiles emerge as key employment drivers
Closer to his field of medicine, he clearly sees employment opportunities opening up with the move to encourage medical value tourism. The idea being to promote India as a hub for medical tourism services with the setting up of five regional medical hubs, in partnership with the private sector. That these will offer integrated healthcare complexes that combine medical, educational and research facilities apart from the AYUSH Centres.
The finance minister in her speech also points to the hubs as centres that will provide “diverse job opportunities for health professionals including doctors and allied healthcare professionals.
Considering that textiles, one of the oldest sectors and one that major job-creator, Dr Ella sees measures announced in the budget like the National Fibre Scheme for self-reliance in natural fibres as crucial apart from the employment scheme to modernise traditional clusters with capital support for machinery, technology upgradation and common testing and certification centres as again measures aimed to generate employment.