Nirmala Sitharaman, during a parliamentary debate on the fiscal year 2023 budget, stated that the agency plans to leave the current tax rules adopted by the regulator for crypto assets and industry participants unchanged.
The position of the Indian Ministry of Finance will remain, despite a significant drop in cryptocurrency trading volumes caused by the introduction of a 30% income tax and a 1% tax withheld at source (TDS).
Severe regulatory restrictions forced the country's crypto community to transfer its trading activities to international exchanges.. In this regard, a number of industry players turned to the Ministry of Finance with a request to reconsider their position regarding cryptocurrency taxes, in particular TDS, setting it in the range from 0.01% to 0.1%.
According to Rajagopal Menon, vice president of the Indian exchange WazirX, the lack of any changes in the tax policy for cryptocurrencies has put Indian crypto companies in an extremely difficult position.. However, despite the hopes of some representatives of the crypto industry for a possible tax cut, no changes were made to existing fiscal rules in 2023.
Moreover, earlier the leadership of the Reserve Bank of India stated that the crypto market cannot be legalized, since the definition of “cryptocurrency” is very vague, and all digital coins are analogous to gambling.