Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the first budget of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s second government on Friday. Among the significant announcements were sops for startups, measures to increase FDI in India, and replacement of PAN card with Aadhaar under certain conditions.
People will now have to shell out more for fuel and precious metals. Justifying it with a focus on domestic industries, the Modi 2.0 government has proposed increasing customs and excise duties further on most imports, while decreasing taxes on exports like that of leather.
Here is what will become costlier:
1. Road and infrastructure cess has been raised by Re 1 per litre on petrol and diesel
3. Construction materials such as floor covering of plastics, ceramic tiles and metal fittings will have a customs duty of 15% from 10%.
4. For 2019-20, marble slabs will see twice as much customs tariff of 40%.
5. An increased duty of 7.5% will be imposed on stainless steel in ingots or other primary forms as well as its semi-furnished products, from the earlier 5%.
6. Cigarettes containing tobacco will become more expensive.
7. A range of automobile parts will also see an increase in rate of duty. That includes motor vehicle parts, chassis and bodies, including cabs, for certain motor vehicles from 10 to 15%.
8. Duty on electronics and electrical equipment increases for indoor and outdoor split-system air conditioning units, loudspeakers, digital video records, network, video recorders, CCTV cameras and optical fibres, among others.
9. Duty on imported books has been increased by 5%
10. Cashews are going to get more expensive. While the earlier tariff rate was 45%, it has now been increased to 70% under this budget.
Here’s what’s going to get cheaper
1. Capital goods for manufacturing electric items including cell phone cameras, phone chargers and adapters, set top boxes, lithium ion cell, display modules will have no customs duties on them.
2. Duty has been withdrawn on electronic parts now manufactured in India.
3. Custom duty being exempted on some parts of electric vehicles.
4. Export duty charges on tanned leather has been removed. Hides, skins, leather, tanned and untanned of all sorts has been reduced from 60% to 40%.
6. The same as above goes for medical devices - “raw material, parts or accessories for use manufacture of artificial kidneys, disposable sterilized dialyzer and micro-barrier of artificial kidney”. While these carried the applicable rate of customs duties, it has now been reduced to none.
7. The duty on inputs for manufacturing CRGO steel, and amorphous alloy ribbon, have been halved to 2.5% and 5% respectively.
8. Custom duties for all forms of Uranium ores and concentrates for generation of nuclear power as well as all goods for the generation of nuclear power are being removed. This has also been applied to goods required for selling up the following power projects: Mahi Banswara Atomic Power project in Rajasthan, Kaiga Atomic Power project in Karnataka, Gorakhpur Atomic Power project in Haryana and Chutka Atomic Power project in Madhya Pradesh.