Live: What Finance Ministry Officials Are Saying About Budget 2019

The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs has increased custom duty on certain products where it saw the room for an increase, its Chairman Pranab Kumar Das said. When asked about the possibility of leading to a tariff war, he said that the effort is to support domestic industries and not intensify any trade disagreements.

"Effort is to make sure that we are not taken for granted that way. We waited for the negotiations to take place, we didn't get a preference under GSP and the government had to take a call as a sovereign nation. We waited for almost two years,”he said.

This comes on the back of recent trade discussions between India and U.S.

Pranab Kumar Das, chairman of the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs agreed with Mody, saying that this year’s revenue targets are realistic and achievable.

The CBIC target has been fixed at Rs 11.19 lakh crore.

This year’s revenue targets are much more realistic than last year’s said Pramod Chandra Mody, chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes.

“If you see the last year's figures of revenue collection, we fell short of the budget targets very marginally. The revenue estimate was a very ambitious target showing a 23-24 percent growth which was unrealistic and you would appreciate that particular realialism in fixation of targets has come in this year,” he said.

This year the direct taxes target is around Rs 13.35 lakh crore which translates to about 17.5 percent.

“If you see the history of tax collection in the past three years, that's a very realistic target,” he added.

One crore is a good threshold to keep which does not impact the common businessman. It's only a select few who get impacted and ultimately we are only collecting a TDS, said Pramod Chandra Mody, chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes.