Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will chair the 46th meeting of the Goods and Service Tax Council meeting in New Delhi on Friday, December 31. The agenda of the meeting will be to discuss the recently-announced hikes in GST rates for textiles, which comes into effect from January 1.
The Council could also deliberate on the reports of the two Groups of Ministers which were set up in the last Council meeting in September.
On the sidelines of a separate pre-budget meeting between Sitharaman, her top officials, and representatives of states and union territories, Tamil Nadu Finance Minister P Thiagarajan and Rajasthan Technical Education Minister Subhash Garg confirmed that the main agenda of the meeting will be to discuss the rate hike in textiles to correct inverted duty structure.
“Rajasthan does believe rate hike on textiles should be rolled back especially when countries like Bangladesh are giving us stiff competition in the sector,” Garg told reporters on Thursday.
“The states received the agenda just yesterday. So a very short notice and textile seems to be the main point of discussion,” Thiagarajan said At the 45th GST Council Meeting in Lucknow on September 17, the Council had decided to rectify inverted duty structure for footwear and textiles. Subsequently the rate for footwear and textiles for any value was raised to 12 percent, effective from January 1, 2022. Earlier the GST Rate was five per cent for sale value up to Rs 1,000 per piece in the case of apparels and per pair in the case of footwear.
While experts hailed the move, a section of the clothing industry decried it saying that only a small group of the sector had inverted duty structure. Many trader organizations have also been demanding a rollback of the rate hikes.
