My Take on budget     

Published: February 15, 2026
Updated: February 15, 2026

Making India attractive for GCCs

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has done well by announcing changes in the safe harbour regime that are expected trigger a wave of investments into the country by new global capability centres of the R&D arms of multinationals, as they provide tax and policy certainty.

The new proposals are expected to improve the ease of doing business for new GCCs as well as for technology companies such as Microsoft and Google that have their target centres in India, reducing chances of disputes over transfer pricing and lowering the compliance burden. India has already seen a huge rush of GCCs, which have shot up to around 1,800. The world’s top companies, ranging from automotive giants Mercedes Benz and BMW to retailers Walmart and Ikea, as well as banking behemoths such as J P Morgan and Bank of America, operate massive captive centres in India.

Another welcome feature of the budget is the announcement of a 20- year tax holiday for foreign data centre investments, which according to industry experts signals that India is ready to host Artificial Intelligence infrastructure at a global scale.

TECHIE BOOSTER

Another key proposal of the budget is on setting up an education-toemployment standing committee to help the strengthen the IT services sector, with an aim to capture 10% of the global marketshare by 2047. Mrs Sitharaman had indicated in her earlier budget speeches that the government was reviewing the safe harbour framework. In an interim notification last March, the government increased the eligibility threshold to Rs 300 crore from Rs 200 crore. In this budget, the finance minister has further raised the threshold to Rs 2,000 crore. She has also announced a common safe harbour margin at 15.5% and bunched the classification of several categories of services under the common head of Information Technologies. According to a Nasscom official, this move supports India’s growth priorities by making the country a more attractive base for global delivery and capability centres.”

For data centres, the budget proposes a safe harbour margin for providing services to a related foreign company. According to an IT expert and chairman and managing director of Sify Technologies, Cloud, AI and digital infrastructure are long-term, capital-intensive foundations. You cannot build this thinking five years ahead – you need to think 20 to 30 years ahead. A tax holiday till 2047 gives exactly that confidence.

(Kumar Mangalam Birla is the supremo of the Aditya Birla group of companies.)