GST 2.0 is approaching its first anniversary. The reform, effective September 22, 2025, collapsed India’s four-slab tax structure into essentially two working rates — 5 percent and 18 percent — plus a narrow 40 percent band for luxury and sin goods, moving most everyday items, from packaged food to household appliances, into lower brackets than before. It was marketed at the time as a “Diwali gift” to consumers, and large FMCG companies did move quickly: Amul cut prices across 700 products, global brands like Uniqlo trimmed tags on multiple items. A year on, the harder question for a state like Tripura isn’t whether the tax rates changed on paper — they plainly did — but whether that change ever reached the shopkeeper in Agartala’s local market and the household budget of the customer buying from them.
The structural reason to doubt a clean pass-through is not speculation; it’s built into how the reform was sequenced. Section 171 of the CGST Act, India’s anti-profiteering provision, requires businesses to pass rate-cut and input-tax-credit benefits on to consumers through commensurate price reductions. The government deactivated that enforcement mechanism from April 1, 2025 — months before GST 2.0’s rate cuts took effect that September. The National Anti-Profiteering Authority, imperfect as its enforcement record already was, no longer had the power to compel compliance precisely when the largest rate rationalisation since 2017 required exactly that kind of oversight. The Consumer Affairs Ministry has since warned traders they could still face penalties under the Weights and Measures Act for failing to pass on benefits, but that’s a considerably blunter, less systematic tool than a dedicated profiteering authority with defined investigative powers.
For large, closely watched national brands, reputational pressure and media scrutiny likely did most of the enforcement work anti-profiteering rules used to do. That pressure operates far more weakly on the small, often informal retail networks that make up the bulk of everyday commerce in a state like Tripura — the local kirana store, the neighbourhood pharmacy, the small appliance dealer — where a shopper has little practical way to verify whether last September’s rate cut on a given item was ever reflected in this week’s price tag, and no local anti-profiteering body left to complain to even if they suspected it wasn’t.
None of this means GST 2.0 failed. Aggregate GST collections have remained robust, and the reform’s simplification of slabs genuinely reduces classification disputes that used to burden small traders with compliance costs. But dailyArchives readers in Tripura’s local markets deserve a more grounded answer than a national press release before concluding the reform delivered for them personally. A year in, without an active enforcement mechanism, the honest answer to whether the promised savings reached Agartala’s shopkeepers and their customers is: nobody has actually verified it, and for many products, likely nobody ever will.
DA Editorial Desk(Sara Debbarma)