Title - No service tax from now on e-tickets

Finance Minister Arun Jaitely has announced to withdraw service tax on e-tickets. E-tickets are usually booked through irctc.co.in on which till date service tax was charged apart from the ticket fare.

The decision to withdraw service tax was announced while presenting budget for 2017-18.

Till date Rs 20 was levied as service tax on Sleeper class berth bookings and Rs 40 was levied on AC class berth bookings through IRCTC. Besides these service charges applied was never refunded in case of cancellation of tickets through website.

Earlier in November last year government waived off service tax when demonetisation was announced to encourage cashless transactions.

IRCTC can book 13 lakh tickets per day and 15000 tickets can be booked in one minute with 3 lakh concurrent users can login simultaneously. As per data revealed, in 2014-15 18.3 crore tickets were booked through IRCTC.