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Informist, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026

 

NEW DELHI – The government told the Delhi High Court that it will process the recommendations given by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Environment, Forest and Climate Change for reducing or scrapping goods and services tax on air purifiers as per the rules. The court was hearing a public interest litigation by advocate Kapil Madan, seeking a direction to the government 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 18%.

 

The government said that judicial orders to lower the goods and services tax on air purifiers would be unconstitutional and infringe upon the doctrine of separation of powers. Article 279A of the Constitution designates the GST Council as the exclusive authority to make decisions regarding GST, said the government. "Any direction by this Hon'ble Court to modify GST rates, convene a meeting of the GST Council, or to compel the GST Council to consider or adopt a particular outcome, would amount to the Hon'ble Court stepping into the shoes of the GST Council, thereby, exercising functions that the Constitution has consciously and exclusively entrusted to the GST Council. Such an exercise would violate the doctrine of separation of powers and render the elaborate and well-defined constitutional role of the GST Council otiose," said the government.

 

The government said that setting tax rates involves a complex process of cooperative federalism, which necessitates consensus between the Union and the states, while also balancing competing fiscal interests. Any judicial intervention in this matter would undermine the constitutionally mandated process, said the government. 

 

The government said that classifying air purifiers as medical devices would subject their import, manufacturing, sale, stocking, and distribution under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940, and the Medical Device Rules, 2017, thereby regulating their availability in the market. The public interest litigation filed by Madan was a "motivated attempt to secure regulatory reclassification under the guise of public interest," said the government.

 

Last month, the high court had directed the GST 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 may take time, the court had 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.

 

If the authorities cannot provide clean air for citizens to breathe, they should at least reduce GST on air purifiers, the court had said. "This is the minimum that you can do," observed the bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela. "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 bench had said.

 

The petitioner had 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.  End

 

Reported by Surya Tripathi

Edited by Akul Nishant Akhoury

 

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