The dread of angel tax—which has agonised start-ups since it was introduced in 2012—has finally been put to rest. Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has proposed in her first Union Budget an easing of angel tax scrutiny.

The government has moved another step closer to the ideal of one-nation-one-all-purpose identity number by allowing the use of Aadhaar besides that of Permanent Account Number for filing tax returns.

India will also have, for the first time since 1992, a top marginal income tax of more than 40%. It is in ‘mission mode’—to use Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s favourite and effective focus phraseology—to ensure than every household in India has access to piped water.

But what is the transition that connects all this activity? It is, I shall argue in this essay, to create the unafraid Indian.

If you think about it, there is one thing that connects your parents and mine, and every other parent in India, even if they do not know, and will never know, one another—that thing is a persistent fear. What if things go wrong? What if we fail? What if someone steals the little that we have?

This is by far the worst trait which has held back Indian enterprise. In India, you know that the system won’t be there to back you up or support you in case something goes wrong. This makes Indians risk averse and also tax averse—after all, if the family is the only support one can ever hope to receive, then why care about and invest in the public ecosystem?

There is little or no social security. Modi is trying to change that by bringing in widespread health insurance and other such ideas—and even today in many parts of the country, you would rather suffer a loss or attack quietly than go to the police station. At times, people fear police harassment more than any trouble they may have faced.

Every service that is rightfully ours as a citizen used to be a burden and a point of relentless pain—from getting a passport to getting a ticket on a train. Each of these pain points are being resolved as the government starts to operate more and more as a service provider. The budget has provisioned an expenditure of ₹50 lakh crores ($73 billion) spread till 2030 in boosting services of Indian Railways, the largest rail network in the world. After the push to create a hundred new airports, this was much awaited. A transformation in the services would have a positive impact on what the Modi government calls ‘ease of living’.

It would also boost tourism which remains the most underutilised sector which has enormous potential in India, but the government perhaps realises that without boosting fundamental infrastructure to dream of high tourist footfall is a joke. Under the Scheme of Fund for Upgradation and Regeneration of Traditional Industries’ (SFURTI), 100 new clusters will be set up so that 50,000 artisans can join the economic value chain, boosting a sector with tremendous potential for sales as evidenced by the ever-rising profits at Khadi and Village Industries Commission (sales up 24% in FY2018) has shown.