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Informist, Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2025

 

--HC asks council to take up issue of GST cut on air purifiers at earliest 

--HC notice to govt on plea seeking GST on air purifiers cut to 5% from 18% 

 

NEW DELHI – The Delhi High Court Wednesday directed the Goods & Services Tax Council to take up at the earliest the issue of lowering the GST rate on air purifiers from 18% to 5%. On the government's statement that the council is a pan-India body and convening a meeting may take time, the court said that given the air quality situation in the national capital and surrounding areas, it would be appropriate for the council to meet at the earliest to decide on the issue.

 

A division bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela said it could not, on the face of it, find any reason why GST on air purifiers could not be lowered to 5%. The case has now been listed for hearing Friday, when the government will have to tell the court when the council can meet. If a physical meeting is not possible, it could be done through video-conferencing, the court said.

 

Advocate Kapil Madan had filed a petition in the public interest seeking a direction to the central government to declare that air purifiers fall within the category of "medical devices" under the Medical Devices Rules 2017, thereby lowering the GST on them to 5% from the current rate of 18%. Air purifiers cannot be treated as a luxury, given the "extreme emergency crisis" caused by dire air pollution in Delhi and nearby areas, Madan told the court.

 

If the authorities cannot provide clean air for citizens to breathe, they should at least reduce GST on air purifiers, the court said. "This is the minimum that you can do," observed the bench. "Every citizen requires fresh air. If you can't (provide) it, the minimum you can do is reduce the GST. How many times do you breathe in a day? 21,000 times. Just calculate the harm you are doing to yourself."

 

The petitioner argued that placing air purifiers in the highest GST slab had rendered the equipment, which has become indispensable to secure minimally safe air indoors, inaccessible to large sections of the population, inflicting an "arbitrary, unreasonable, and constitutionally impermissible" burden on citizens. "Air purifiers perform a critical medical-device function by enabling safe respiration and mitigating life-threatening exposures, placing them squarely within the preventive and physiological-support purposes," the petitioner said.

 

The continued imposition of 18% GST on air purifiers, despite their medically recognised role in crisis situations and their functional equivalence to devices taxed at 5%, constitutes an arbitrary and unreasonable fiscal classification, he argued. Such differential treatment fails the constitutional test of intelligible differentia and bears no rational connection with public-health objectives, warranting judicial intervention, he said.  End

 

Reported by Surya Tripathi

Edited by Rajeev Pai

 

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