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Nirmala Sitharaman on GST rationalisation, popcorn controversy, BJP’s freebie trap & more

  • 04 Feb 2025
  • Team Edukating
  • 388

Nirmala Sitharaman, Finance Minister after presenting a record-breaking eighth consecutive Budget in conversation with Navika Kumar of Times Now. The objective of GST rationalisation extends beyond merely reducing tax rates. It aims to streamline the existing rates of 0%, 5%, 12%, 18%, and 28% by potentially eliminating one of the rates, such as 12% or 18%, and aligning it with the nearest applicable rate. This approach is in contrast to the previous GST framework, which allowed for a uniform tax rate of 15% on various items; they have progressively lowered this to 11%.

A big demand on the part of India Inc in this particular Budget was on the rationalisation of GST. Is such an exercise on in the GST Council and how soon is this going to be resolved because private sector investment is not coming as per the expectation and job creation depends on that. Growth has slowed down in the quarters of last year. How soon would this exercise be complete?

Nirmala Sitharaman: See, the group of ministers have almost done the work of rationalising the rates. I had gone through the details. In fact, I did say this to some of the Congress and non-Congress finance ministers, that we can do more in it. Meaning, the rationalisation was not just to bring the rates down. Rationalisation was also to make sure that where you have zero, 5%, 12%, 18%, and 28%, we can drop one of the rates 18 or 12 or whatever and move those to the closest possible rate because if you compare with current GST where we could tax at the rate of 15% on any item, we have gradually brought it down to 11%.

Meaning, before GST, whatever rate prevailed, if we had to continue at the same thing, we could have remained at 15% itself. But we have progressively brought down the rates and that is why today it is at 11%. We wanted to come further down, particularly for essential goods, which common people use daily. If we can bring as many of them down to, say, 5%, or where they are at 18, at least bring them to 12%, and so on.

Source : https://m.economictimes.com/markets/expert-view/nirmala-sitharaman-on-gst-rationalisation-popcorn-controversy-bjps-freebie-trap-more/amp_articleshow/117903502.cms

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