NEW DELHI: With the US import tariff hike looming large, India has said it is not a tariff king. In a recent interaction with TNIE, finance and revenue secretary Tuhin Kanta Pandey said with a ‘fairly comprehensive exercise’ to rationalise import duties, India can’t be termed as tariff king as US president Donald Trump had referred India in his election campaigns.
Pandey said out of 8,562 tariff lines, 6,500 are below 10%, 7,600 are below 15% and 8,400 tariff lines are below 20%. “There are 216 tariff lines currently that have 0% duty, we have changed it to 260 (in budget),” says Pandey, who was inducted to the revenue department 20 days before the budget from the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (DIPAM).
“We want people to know that this is a comprehensive exercise and wherever some outliers were there, we have taken them off. We have removed rates of 125%, 150% and 100% under industrial goods. We have one rate at high level and that’s 70% on only very few items. We have removed 40%, 35%, 30% and 25% and brought them down to 20%,” he says responding to a question on possible measures taken by India to avoid any tariff action by the Trump administration in the US.