A few years ago, Renu, a transgender woman, was pushed out of a moving bus by angry passengers while she was begging for alms. The fall injured her legs, left her immobile, and limited her social and economic life. For Renu, a mobility vehicle signifies her hope to regain access to community and livelihood opportunities. However, with effect from October 8th, the GST Concession Certificate...
A few years ago, Renu, a transgender woman, was pushed out of a moving bus by angry passengers while she was begging for alms. The fall injured her legs, left her immobile, and limited her social and economic life. For Renu, a mobility vehicle signifies her hope to regain access to community and livelihood opportunities. However, with effect from October 8th, the GST Concession Certificate Scheme for Persons with Disabilities was discontinued, which previously allowed purchase of mobility vehicles at a lower tax rate. This is because recently, the Ministry of Heavy Industries standardised the GST rate on cars for persons with orthopaedic disability at a uniform 18%.
To begin with, the GST concession was never a charity. Rather, an acknowledgement that persons with disabilities incur extra costs in achieving basic mobility and autonomy. Especially for those like Renu, at the intersections of disability, poverty, and social exclusion, this logic of standardisation is a moral erasure. The fiscal regime, calibrated to recognise only certain bodies and livelihoods, cannot even see them. Taxing rights-enabling necessities such as mobility aids and other assistive technologies, equivalent to consumable goods, is dehumanising in the name of standardisation.
Discontinuing the GST concession for persons with disabilities is not fiscal standardisation, but reintroducing disadvantage through the back door. It separates bodies from their social, material and historical contexts. Therefore, the Delhi High Court's recent questioning of the decision to scrap the GST concession reopens a fundamental debate about what the State owes to its most marginalised citizens. The Court's question, “What have you done for the vulnerable?” is not rhetorical. It is an inquiry into the moral architecture of the State.
The Violence of Fiscal Standardisation
The case of Renu highlights the cruelty of fiscal blindness towards extremely marginalised groups. The intersection of disability and transgender identity here is a case in point that lays bare how fiscal policies overlook compounded vulnerabilities intersecting in lived realities. These lived realities have consistently articulated claims of dignity and equity rather than sympathy. However, disability jurisprudence in India has long struggled to escape the grammar of charity. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 promised to reframe disability as a matter of rights, not pity. Similarly, the National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India (NALSA, 2014) judgment recognised transgender people, affirming their right to dignity, autonomy, and equality, which are not privileges to be granted but inherent rights to be realised.
Yet these guarantees often fail to translate recognition into distribution of resources. For Renu, the standardisation of GST rates translates into exclusion. By treating disability or gender identity as irrelevant to taxation, the state imagines a citizen without a body, without social context, without need. The paradox lies in how a measure intended to create uniformity ends up deepening inequality, stripping fiscal policy of its social sensitivity. A mobility vehicle is essentially expensive for someone from her economic background, and now the loss of the concessional rate makes it unaffordable. The GST revision, in this sense, becomes a fiscal instrument of exclusion: it signals who do not belong and whose needs are not necessary to be recognised.
The GST may treat all buyers identically, but equality of taxation is meaningless when the social cost of mobility is borne so unevenly. The fiscal state, as Professor Upendra Baxi observed, has often remained governed by what has calls “the bureaucratic reason of the market”. Here, justice is measured not in emancipation but in efficiency. It elevates procedural uniformity over moral responsibility. Such an assumption reduces equality into bureaucratic fiction, detached from the lived realities of deprivation.
The idea of fiscal neutrality assumes that citizens occupy an even moral and material terrain, erasing the asymmetries that structure their access to rights and resources. But neutrality presumes a level playing field, which social reality in India fundamentally is not. Here, social hierarchies intersect across caste, class, gender, and disability, producing layered marginalities that shape access to resources and rights. Thus, the removal of GST concessions for persons with disabilities on the grounds of standardisation of taxes and neutrality confuses formal equality with substantive justice.
Toward an Intersectional Fiscal Citizenship
The debate extends beyond disability and transgender rights. Taxation, in a democracy, is not merely a tool of revenue collection. It is one of the state's most intimate engagements with its citizens. Through the act of taxation (and its concessions), the state signals its obligations and solidarities. When such instruments of care and recognition are standardised, as in the recent decision of the Ministry of Heavy Industries to discontinue GST concessions for mobility vehicles, this intimacy turns into indifference. Ergo, true fiscal justice requires asymmetry.
A more inclusive vision of citizenship demands that the tax regime recognise difference as a constitutional value. In this reasoning, Renu's right to move freely, to exist as both a disabled and transgender person with dignity, is not peripheral. To make her mobility unaffordable in the name of fiscal standardisation and simplification is social cruelty. Amending this requires reinstating targeted GST concessions for persons with disabilities. Simultaneously, it is imperative to acknowledge intersectional marginalities and ensure that these benefits can be claimed without bureaucratic apathy or documentation traps. Equality, then, must be understood not as identical treatment but as substantive redress of structural disadvantage.
As we await December 17th for the Delhi High Court to revisit this issue, its pointed question, “What have you done for the vulnerable?” becomes exceedingly resonant. Beyond the courtroom, it is a reminder that constitutional morality is a compass for governance. The GST concession dispute, in this sense, is a mirror that reflects the kind of equality we are willing to defend.
Author is a Human Rights Lawyer and Sociologist Views Are Personal.