India’s Budget 2026 has quietly de-risked global IT delivery – and why US & European companies should care!
Authored by Kapil Mehta, CFO & COO (US)
For years, India has been central to global IT services.
Talent and scale were never the issue.
What held many US and European companies back was certainty — especially around long-term tax and pricing outcomes.
India's Union Budget 2026 materially changes that.
This Budget is not about incentives or subsidies. It is about removing friction from cross-border IT services and positioning India as predictable digital trade infrastructure.
What changed?
• Expanded Safe Harbor rules now cover much larger IT operations
• Standardized margins under a unified IT services category
• Rule-based, automated acceptance, reducing subjectivity
• Multi-year pricing certainty, enabling long-term planning
• Faster pathways for Advance Pricing Agreements for large global players
In simple terms, India is aligning its IT services framework with how global trade actually works: predictability first.
We are a US-based global IT services company with a listed parent entity in India. In this new policy environment, that positioning becomes a clear advantage for US based companies.
What this means for them:
• US-centric contracting and accountability
• India delivery backed by public-company governance and controls
• Lower long-tail risk from transfer-pricing disputes
• Ability to scale India operations with confidence, not caution
The Budget also signals India’s ambition to become a global hub for cloud, AI, and data-center-led services. As AI and cloud workloads increasingly serve global users, infrastructure location becomes a strategic trade decision — not just an IT one.
What this means:
US companies — India delivery is now more board-defensible.
Are your India risk assumptions still valid?
European companies — Reduced audit subjectivity makes India viable for regional or global digital hubs.
Could certainty unlock scale you previously avoided?
Global IT services are no longer about where talent is cheapest.
They are about where operations are predictable, scalable, and defensible.
India has moved decisively in that direction.
The question is: has your global delivery strategy caught up?