Wheelchair Tax – GST on disability aids is unfair
Imagine being taxed each time you went for a walk, to print a document, or for simply having your limbs intact. This is precisely the manifest injustice being faced by millions of disabled Indians. Although it sounds absurd and patently unfair, this is a consequence of the Goods and Services Tax regime prevalent in India. This law was enacted in 2017 to simplify and consolidate India’s tax regime. For the last seven years, since its enactment, disabled individuals who rely upon prosthetic limbs, Braillers and wheelchairs must compulsorily pay an additional five per cent tax on these essential mobility aids.
Revenue policymakers in India have created such a regime which not just discriminates against the disabled but goes a step further and effectively penalises them for being disabled. This comes as a surprise given Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s concern for the disabled whom he refers to as being “divyang” — which means divine in Hindi. The constitutional position concerning this brazen illegality is unambiguous. A tax regime which has the effect of penalising movement and learning, activities that able-bodied individuals do not pay any tax for, outrightly fails the test of reasonableness under Article 14 of the Constitution. Even without applying any esoteric and complex legal principles, a layman can also understand the unfairness of the arithmetic behind this.
Let us take the case of a wheelchair user who pays five per cent GST for a motorised wheelchair costing Rs 1 lakh. If the life of the wheelchair is taken to be 500 kilometres, the tax burden on the disabled user can easily be worked out to be Rs 10 per kilometre. Naturally, an able-bodied person would scoff at the notion of having to pay the government a tax for every kilometre they walk. Similarly, a blind person today must absorb the tax burden of a Braille publisher, which is an additional levy owing only to them being blind. Such a tax levied on goods used by people with disabilities for their movement and to acquire knowledge amounts to the most explicit and trenchant form of discrimination possible.
