Addressing the media after chairing the 44th GST Council meet, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that the Council decided to go ahead with the recommendations made by the Group of Ministers (GoM) in their report. “It was felt that the GoM’s recommendations have brought substantial change. GST Council largely agreed to go with the recommendations, except for some slight tweaking,” Sitharaman said.
All these revised rates will be valid till September 30 as against August-end, she added.
The meeting was attended by minister of state (MoS) for finance Anurag Thakur, finance ministers of states and Union territories and senior officers from the government and states.
Tax on medicines, some hospital equipment and other items needed in the fight against COVID-19 has been reduced by the Goods and Services Tax Council. The tax cut is based on recommendations by a Group of Ministers amid the pandemic, whose crippling effects on the economy has also hurt household finance, the constitutional body that decides rates for the GST has said.
No tax will be charged for medicines like the monoclonal antibody Tocilizumab and Amphotericin B, used for treating Black Fungus, an opportunistic fungal disease that affects people infected with Covid.
There is no change in the GST rate of some items being charged at 18 per cent, such as RT-PCR machines, RNA extraction machines and genome sequencing machines. Genome sequencing kits that are being charged at 12 per cent will continued to be charged at the same rate.
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