The Goods and Services Tax (GST) has adversely impacted the common people, particularly unorganised sector workers and those engaged in small and decentralised manufacturing such as tailoring, garments, textile, beedi, small drug manufacturing, construction, matches & fireworks and passenger & goods transport, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) has said.

“Even insurance premium is not spared from high taxation. Normal activities in many of these sectors have been affected and/ or collapsed, leading to massive job losses,” the trade union said in a resolution adopted by it at its central meeting held in Shimla on Sunday, in the wake of growing countrywide protests by traders and small manufacturers.

CITU said the GST regime had resulted in an “enormously higher burden of taxation on many essential commodities”, including medicines, making them costlier, and had imposed a “heavier burden” on people, especially informal workers.

The trade unions also flayed the new taxation regime for subsuming the welfare-related cess on non-coal mining, beedi and the cine-sector, thereby, taking away the welfare/social security-related rights of the workers in these sectors, and called for lowering of GST on all essential commodities and making it nil on all essential medicines.

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