India’s Petroleum and Natural Gas Ministry is making a renewed bid to get natural gas, petroleum and allied products included in goods and services tax (GST) in the national Budget to be placed by the Finance Ministry before Parliament on February 1. When GST was introduced in July 2017, 17 federal and state taxes were merged, but crude oil, natural gas, petrol, diesel and aviation turbine fuel were kept out of the pan-India taxation regime, ostensibly because states were heavily dependent on local levies for revenues.
