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Union Budget 2025: Check the full list of items that will get costlier or cheaper after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s Budget 2025 announcements.
India Budget 2025: Goods and services that got cheaper or costlier after Budget 2025.
Budget 2025 Costlier Cheaper Items: The Union Budget 2025 was presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday. All eyes were on what gets cheaper and what gets expensive as the Finance Minister announced major customs duty changes on several products from cancer drugs to wet blue leather.
While presenting the Union Budget 2025, FM Sitharaman announced that the government proposes to remove 7 tariff rates. This is over and above the 7 tariff rates removed in 2023-24 budget. “After this, there will be only 8 remaining tariff rates including ‘zero’ rate,” the FM said.
The FM proposed to apply appropriate cess to broadly maintain effective duty incidence except on a few items, where such incidence will reduce marginally. The Budget 2025 also proposes to “levy not more than one cess or surcharge. Therefore, It is proposed to exempt Social Welfare Surcharge on 82 tariff lines that are subject to a cess.”
What Gets Cheaper?
- Cancer, chronic disease medicines: 36 life saving drugs fully exempted from basic custom duties.
- Electronic Goods: The FM announced reduction of BCD (basic customs duty) to 5 per cent for open cells and other components. The BCD on inputs and Parts of the Open Cells for use in the manufacture of Television Panels of LED/LCD TV has also been cut from 2.5 per cent to 0 per cent.
- Minerals: Cobalt powder and waste, scrap of lithium-ion battery, Lead, Zinc and 12 more critical minerals to be exempted from Basic Customs Duty (BCD).
- EVs: 35 additional goods for EV battery manufacturing, and 28 additional goods for mobile phone battery manufacturing to be added to list of exempted capital goods.
- Leather goods: Wet Blue leather to be fully exempted from Basic Customs Duty
- Surimi: BCD on Frozen Fish Paste (Surimi) to be reduced from 30 per cent to 5 per cent for manufacture and export of its analogue products. BCD has also been reduced from 15 per cent to 5 per cent on fish hydrolysate for manufacture of fish and shrimp feeds.
- Handicrafts: To facilitate exports of handicrafts, the time period for export has been extended from six months to one year, further extendable by another three months, if required. Nine items have been added to the list of duty-free inputs.
- Raw materials for shipbuilding: Raw materials for shipbuilding exempt from BCD for an additional 10 years.
What Gets Costlier?
- Interactive Flat Panel Display: FM Sitharaman has proposed to increase the Basic Customs Duty on interactive flat-panel displays from 10 per cent to 20 per cent.
- Knitted Fabrics: To promote domestic production of technical textile products such as agro-textiles, medical textiles and geo textiles at competitive prices, two more types of shuttle-less looms have been added to the list of fully exempted textile machinery. The BCD rate on knitted fabrics covered by nine tariff lines have been changed from “10% or 20%” to “20% or 115 per kg, whichever is higher”.
In the Budget 2024 speech, Sitharaman had announced customs rate cuts on certain items including mobile phones, chargers and some cancer drugs. Sitharaman had also proposed a reduction in customs duties on gold and silver to 6 per cent and that of platinum to 6.4 per cent. She had also proposed to remove basic customs duty (BCD) on ferronickel and blister copper.
More importantly, the Finance Minister had also proposed to comprehensively review the customs duty structure within six months, which is why it is expected that there may be key announcements on customs duty in Budget 2025-26.
Meanwhile, gold and silver were trading higher on Saturday ahead of the Budget Speech. Gold rate in Mumbai was trading higher by Rs 160 at Rs 84,490 per 10 grams for 24 carats, while the price for 22 carat was up by Rs 150 to Rs 77,450 per 10 grams.
