Sinha gives soft push to hardware

After a series of budgets that offered major sops to the software industry Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha turned his attention to hardware in the Union Budget 2002-03. The hardware industry has received two major incentives from Sinha:

• The zero-duty import regime, which was proposed to be advanced to 2003 in the previous budget, has been pushed back to 2005
• The customs duty on a number of hardware inputs has been reduced to 5 per cent, while that on certain capital goods has been cut to 15 per cent. Sinha also announced that import duties on certain items will be reduced to 10 per cent or 5 per cent in accordance with the WTO agreement.