Budget 2024: Which Items Are Now Less Expensive?

In New Delhi, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman while presenting the budget 2024 revealed a significant cut in customs duties on cancer medications and mobile phones, which is expected to lower their retail prices considerably. Additionally, imported gold, silver, leather products, and seafood will also become more affordable.

Here’s a summary of the changes from Budget 2024:

Items That Have Become Cheaper:

• Basic Customs Duty (BCD) on mobile phones and chargers reduced to 15%.
• Customs duty on gold and silver lowered to 6% and on platinum to 6.4%.
• Three cancer treatment medicines exempted from basic customs duty.
• Expansion of exempted capital goods list for solar panel manufacturing.
• Reduction in TDS rate on e-commerce from 1% to 0.1%.

Items That Have Become Costlier:

• Rise in customs duty on ammonium nitrate to 10%.
• Increase in customs duty on non-biodegradable plastics to 25%.

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In the 2023 budget, the Finance Minister had reduced import taxes on camera lenses to boost mobile phone manufacturing in India and cut taxes on lithium-ion batteries to lower production costs for phones and electric vehicles.

The Economic Survey 2024 projects India's GDP growth between 6.5-7% for the year, with retail inflation declining to 5.4% from 6.7% in the previous year.

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