The new government has been widely cherished by the general public for taking proactive steps to control price rise. If we talk about the price of petrol and diesel, which is the lifeline of the automotive industry, it has been steadily controlled. In fact, the government even took the bold step of deregulating the price of diesel.
But wait, just when you thought that this is finally the dawn of #achedin, the government has bowled a googly and increased the excise duty on both petrol and diesel according to Economic Times. There has been a hike on excise duty of Rs 2.25 per litre on petrol and Rs 1 on diesel. And if you would like to know – this is the second such hike in as many months. The government had raised the excise duty by Rs 1.50 for both petrol and diesel earlier. This rise will allow the government to fetch an additional revenue of Rs 4,000 crore in the last four months left in the present financial year.
What this means for the end user like you is – you have been devoid of at least two price slashes on petrol and diesel to the tune of about Rs 3 to Rs 4! And amidst all this joy of concurrent price reductions, majority of us did not bother talking about this. What the present government has quite cunningly done is – they have kept this as a buffer which they may use when the international crude prices will shoot upwards again.
There is another interesting trend which our current government is enjoying the laurels of! It is the constant drop of international crude oil prices which has resulted in petrol/diesel price slashes. When the NDA government came to power, international crude oil prices used to float above 105 dollars a barrel but now it is trading at around 66-70 dollars a barrel which is a massive drop. And since the price of both petrol and diesel is directly related to the price of crude oil now, the drop had to be made. As per an estimate for every 10 dollar drop in price of crude oil, the oil import expenditure gets reduced by 9 billion dollars.
So, in a nutshell:
- You have been devoid of at least two petrol/diesel price reductions from November.
- The already heavily taxed fuels have received further duty increments.
- Next time, when there is a price rise, the government may reduce these temporary excise duty hikes and boast of about them!
I don’t get it!.. Do you mean that there will be a severe price hike soon?
No!
Simple news is – Government has raised excise duty on already overtaxed Petrol and diesel twice since November this year, taking advantage of the falling prices… 🙂