Price Waterhouse & Co

The Budget could consider levying customs duty on the basis of broader categories of the industry to reduce the number of tax rates, Price Waterhouse & Co LLP said on Thursday. The "government may come out with different slabs for various products depending on where it is placed in the value chain. Goods may be categorised as Value added/primary and raw material/Intermediary and accordingly slab rates may be fixed," said Anurag Sehgal, Managing Director at Price Waterhouse & Co LLP. The 2024-25 Budget had announced that a comprehensive review of the Customs Duty rate structure will be undertaken over the next six months to rationalise and simplify it for ease of trade, removal of duty inversion and reduction of disputes. To reduce classification disputes, the Budget had announced a review of the customs duty rates. Currently, there are more than a dozen customs duty rates and the government is looking at reducing the number of rate slabs. The Budget for 2025-26 will be tabled .

Livpure is betting big on its water-as-a-service model, targeting over 10 lakh subscriptions in the next four years as it intensifies efforts to scale up affordable access to clean and purified water across India, according to company Managing Director Rakesh Kaul. The company, also present in categories such as appliances, mattresses and sleep accessories, is targeting a turnover of Rs 900 crore this fiscal year, a growth of up to 60 per cent from the previous year. "India is a huge market, and everyone knows that purified water and access to purified water is a big challenge...Currently, in a country the size of ours, penetration of water purifiers is still at 7 to 8 per cent of the total household population of India," Kaul told PTI. With a view to reducing the cost of access to clean drinking water to consumers, he said,"We launched an innovative business model called water-as-a-service four years back, whereby we decided that the installation (of electric water purifier) will .

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