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Informist, Friday, Dec. 26, 2025

 

NEW DELHI – The government Friday told the Delhi High Court that the public interest litigation seeking lowering of goods and services tax rate on air purifiers from 18% to 5% was motivated and driven by an agenda that would open a Pandora's box for parties seeking a direction from courts to the GST Council in the future. The government said that it had a few concerns about the public interest litigation filed by advocate Kapil Madan, and sought time to file a detailed reply contesting the petition for convening a GST Council meeting to take up the issue of tax cut on air purifiers.

 

The health department is not even a party as a respondent in the petition that has sought to declare air purifiers as medical devices, the government said, adding that the GST Council couldn't do that on its own. The petitioner relied on recommendations given by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Environment, Forest and Climate Change, which had urged the government to sympathetically consider reducing or scrapping GST on air purifiers. However, the environment ministry is also not impleaded as a party in the case by the petitioner, the government said. It has gone through the rules and there is a lot of procedure and licensing involved, it said. "Who does he (the petitioner) want to benefit (for seeking directions for tax cut on air purifiers), we don't know," the government said.

 

There was a process involved, the government said, questions how could this process be scuttled. The GST Council is a constitutional body and the petitioner was seeking relief on a federal levy, the government said. All states and the Union ministry have to argue for a tax cut on air purifiers and it has to be physically voted for, not virtually, it added.

 

On Wednesday, the Delhi High Court had directed the Goods and 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 was a pan-India body and convening a meeting might 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. The high court 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 was listed for hearing Friday, when the government was to tell the court when the council could meet.

 

On Friday, a different bench sitting on court holidays, said the previous bench's concern was regarding the situation in Delhi and surrounding areas. "Why can't it be done? Do whatever you have to do. Right now, an air purifier costs INR 10,000 to 15,000. Why not bring down the GST to a reasonable level where even a common man can afford an air purifier," the court said. The government said it could not react in two days and needed time to file a detailed reply on the issue.

 

The court said that if the case had to be deliberated, it should be heard by the previous bench after the vacations were over. The court allowed the government to file a detailed reply on the petition and listed the case for hearing on Jan. 9.

 

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

 

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 failed the constitutional test of intelligible differentia and nore no rational connection with public health objectives, warranting judicial intervention, he said.  End

 

Reported by Surya Tripathi

Edited by Avishek Dutta

 

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