Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has urged the GST Council to grant exemption to all input ingredients like butter, purified butter or ghee, edible oil and spices, for preparing “langar” (community kitchen) food served by gurudwaras.
Mr Kumar wrote a letter to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in this regard. He said even though food served through a langar is not taxable under GST but some significant inputs like sugar, ghee, edible oil, spices are taxable.
The Centre has exempted food supplied by religious places of worship like temples, mosques, churches and gurudwaras from GST but ruled out granting tax exemption to inputs used for making prasad such as sugar, vegetable edible oils, ghee and butter.