Budget Highlights by TIOL Tube

The Union Finance Minister, Mr Arun Jaitley, today presented his reformist budget and did not disappoint any segment of the taxpayers' community. Apart from abolishing Wealth Tax Act, 1957 and officially guillotining Direct Tax Code (DTC) he also deferred the least liked GARR (General Anti-Avoidance Rules) for two more years. Although he did not offer much tax sops to individual taxpayers but he also did not disappoint them. Similarly, he laid down a roadmap for the reduction of corporate tax rate to 25% over a period of four years and also promised to phase out exemptions to give a fillip to the stagnant tax-base in India. On the service tax front, he hiked the tax rate to 14% in order to align the same to the proposed GST roll-out. In the same spirit he also rationalised the central excise and Customs tax rates apart from doing away with SAD.