Nirmala Sitharaman, the finance minister, suggested on Wednesday that the GST might soon apply to petroleum products. The comments were made just a few months after Hardeep Singh Puri, the minister of petroleum and natural gas, declared that the central government was prepared to bring gasoline and diesel under the GST regime.
It could be accomplished if there was an agreement among the states, Sitharaman said on Wednesday during a post-Budget interactive session with the members of the industry chamber PHDCCI.
“They benefit financially from this. Why would someone who is making money leave it? Energy and alcohol are two sources of income. The only entity concerned about inflation and other issues is the central government, according to Puri.
On Wednesday, Sitharaman stated that the government had worked to raise public spending in an effort to support growth over the years. She added that states were being pushed to implement the “one nation, one ration card” programme as well as reforms in a number of sectors, including the power industry.
“Consistently for the last three-four years, the emphasis has been given on public capital expenditure. We have kept that up in this budget…capital expenditure, clearly can be said as a real focus of this budget,” she said.
Sitharaman said that the government had increased the capital expenditure by 33% to ₹10 lakh crore in the 2023-24 budget.
The gross GST revenue collected in January 2023 was ₹1,55,922 crore. This was the third time so far this fiscal year that the GST collection has surpassed the threshold of 1.50 lakh crore. Only the collection reported in April 2022 is higher than the GST collection in January 2023.
