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Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman revealed over the weekend that a reduced and rationalised GST would be announced soon, after a group of ministers given the job of overhauling the tax system in 2021 submit their recommendations to the GST council. The group’s mandate was to cut the number of tax brackets and bring down the so-called revenue neutral rate, an adjusted rate that had been introduced to prevent the government’s total tax revenue from dropping. Speaking on Saturday, Sitharaman said that this rate had already fallen to 11.4 per cent in 2023, from 15.8 per cent in 2017, and would “come down even further”. A downward trend in tax rates would be in keeping with this year’s union budget, which sought to put more money in the hands of the people. The finance minister also suggested that the rationalisation process would reduce the number of tax brackets. But the general trend of the GST council’s decisions in the past few years has been to increase it. If you recall, after its last meeting, the council announced three different taxes on popcorn.