Budget 2026 and the Fragile Math of Corporate Legacy

There is work we do for money. And then there is work we do for our obituary.

That thought stayed with me as the New Year opened thanks to a founder’s public flex. Deepinder Goyal’s Twitter skirmish, followed by that podcast appearance where he kept stretching, adjusting, never quite at ease in his own chair, oddly symbolic of what happens when scale arrives before stillness.

India’s first generation of tech unicorns like Zomato, Lenskart, Ola, OYO, Paytm, Razorpay, Flipkart, now are entering their legacy-defining decade. These founders have mastered growth curves, blitzscaling, capital raises, and public markets. But now they are being audited for their values too, when business school only prepared them for the audit of their valuations.

And now the Union Budget 2026 is approaching. The air is already thick with numbers: fiscal deficit targets, tax rationalisation, production-linked incentives, capex multipliers. But beneath this quantitative noise lies a quieter, more fragile equation (one I’m not sure anyone is modelling carefully enough) and that’s ‘The math of legacy’.

Let me be clear. This is not a degrowth sermon. Companies that do not work for money do not survive long enough to leave a legacy at all. Profit is not the problem. Confusion is. Specifically, the confusion between accumulation and circulation.

In psychology, stagnation breeds anxiety. In economics, it breeds inefficiency. In both systems, the antidote is the same: velocity. Velocity of thought, velocity of trust and velocity of capital.

The problem is that we have trained that velocity in only one direction, because Maslow’s pyramid only taught us to climb—from survival to esteem, from revenue to valuation, from brand recognition to symbolic immortality. Fair enough. That climb built modern India’s corporate story. But what Maslow never taught us was when to stop climbing.

For that, we need to turn to a more elegant, homegrown model- Buddhism.

When most people hear the word “Buddhism,” they think of release. A long exhale. Letting go. What is often missed is that this release is not escapism. It is efficiency. Buddhism is not anti-ambition; it is anti-drag. It asks a simple question: what no longer moves life forward?

Translated into fiscal terms, this becomes uncomfortably concrete. Every rupee locked into vanity valuations, speculative hoarding, or excessive buybacks is a rupee withheld from something generative—R&D, workforce health, long-term innovation. The healthiest economies are not the ones that hoard capital but the ones that metabolise it.

Budget 2026 has an opportunity to make this release structural rather than spiritual. Differential tax treatment that favours reinvestment over buybacks. Payroll-linked credits tied to measurable upskilling. Performance-linked wage incentives for MSMEs that translate productivity gains into income security. Far from being “anti-growth,” this would increase capital velocity- turning Buddhist minimalism into CFO realism.

Legacy and profit, after all, have never been opposites in India. From merchant guilds to the House of Tata, our economic history has always paired ‘artha’ with ‘dharma’. The real question is whether India’s new wealth class remembers this inheritance.

This is not a call for charity. Charity is episodic. What we need is continuity. We need stakeholder capitalism not as moral theatre, but as systems logic. If profit sustains purpose, purpose stabilises profit. ‘Paisa vasool’ and ‘purpose vasool’ were never meant to be rivals.

In fiscal design, that means rewarding companies that internalise well-being not as philanthropy, but as performance.

Trust, inconveniently, has economic yield.

Transparent cultures reduce compliance costs, litigation risk, and capital friction. India still spends an estimated 3–4% of GDP navigating distrust—layer upon layer of reporting complexity, audits, enforcement cycles, and legal wrangles, all downstream of suspicion. The Buddhist principle of “seeing clearly” maps cleanly here: simplify what is clean, scrutinise what is not.

Imagine a Budget that translates this psychology into policy. Tiered compliance regimes for firms with verified governance scores. Tax rebates for companies that align wages with cost-of-living indices. An ESG credit explicitly weighted toward the Social pillar—fair pay, mental health, workforce inclusion—rather than treating it as a soft add-on to environmental metrics. Trust, it turns out, is the cheapest form of capital formation.

And yet, no founder can “let go” alone.

The 2026 marketplace is unforgiving. If one CEO slows to invest in people while another races ahead on cost-cutting, boards and investors will punish the moral outlier. This is capitalism’s Prisoner’s Dilemma—where conscience feels like competitive disadvantage.

That is why policy must act as a bridge.

The Finance Minister can make ethical conduct strategically safe—by embedding profit-sharing and worker welfare into credit-rating metrics, or by linking tax benefits to transparent, outcome-based ESG reporting. SEBI, meanwhile, could ease the growing compliance drag—especially from the reporting explosion triggered by global Pillar Two taxation and mandatory ESG disclosures—by rewarding clean actors with faster approvals and differentiated oversight.

If the fiscal code stops punishing decency as inefficiency, India’s social infrastructure strengthens without slowing economic momentum. Incentivising the Social pillar of ESG is not softness. It is resilience engineering.

When Budget 2026 is tabled, it will be judged on whether the fiscal deficit stays below 4.9%. That arithmetic matters. Calories still matter in a hungry nation. But health is never measured by intake alone. It is measured by metabolism.

Legacy, in the end, is not built by how much capital one raises, but by how much one releases—into fair wages, into transparency, into trust. Budgets can quantify this ambition. And founder behaviour can compound it.