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Preeti Mehra

NEW DELHI, Feb. 21

THE new economy's highly competitive scenario requires specialised skills as well as multi-tasking to provide the cutting edge to business.

And that's where training of managers, executives and shop floor employees has become an essential input to increase productivity and cut costs.

Hence, with human resource development high on the priority agenda but training budgets being slashed due to recessionary trends, training companies hope that this Budget will see tax deductions and exemption or capitalisation of expenses for all people development activity within companies.

"This will initiate and give impetus to the process of developing the human capital capability thus resulting in national capacity building,'' says Mr Muralidhar Rao, COO, NIS Sparta, a training and consulting organisation currently working with varied industries including auto, FMCG, telecom, banking, insurance, ITES and railways.

"After all, training is a value addition and increasingly becoming a critical input and it would make sense to capitalise this kind of expense,'' says Mr Mukesh Khetarpal of Indus Management Consultants Pvt Ltd endorsing that if the Budget made such a provision, it would help companies in the highly competitive scenario.

"Two organisations may be equal in every way — same skills, same technology, same product — what makes one superior to the other are the people and the investment in them.''

In fact, Mr Khetarpal goes one step further and feels that training should come under a separate agenda in the balance sheet. In that way it would also be a qualitative measure of the organisation's standing. Meanwhile, ProsoftTraining Asia Ltd, which has just launched an e-security training curriculum in India, hopes that the Government will allocate some part of the Budget to e-governance and e-security issues that are being faced by its departments.

"E-security is a prime concern for the entire nation and needs close attention. We hope that the training of people in this arena is also kept under consideration during the Budget. Maybe a special cell that looks into this issue can be formed,'' says Sanjay Dixit, Regional Manager -- India.

However, ResourceGroup head, Sandeep Chaudhury, has a different take on the issue. He feels that tax sops for training could be misused by corporates to siphon funds or else promoters will start their own training arms. Instead, an accountability mechanism will help to increase spending on training.

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