The sin in the shawl

Next time you go to buy a Kashmiri shawl, ride in a BMW car; when you commit a sin, commit it fulsome. But there is a spoiler. The devil intends to have a bigger cut from the pleasure in your sin: 28% GST on shawls, mathematically speaking.

The proposal with the GST Council Group of Ministers is a real shocker for all those associated with the shawl industry in Kashmir – artisans, sellers and buyers. Anything above 10,000 rupees in shawl and crewel items, the recommendation goes, is to be shifted from the current median rate of 12 per cent to the slab of 28 per cent. What does that mean? It means that shawls will be, in case the proposal before the GST Council Group of Ministers is accepted, costlier. So a buyer would now think twice before actually getting a shawl that is priced above ten thousand; every likelihood market shrinks for this product.

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If it were only this, the proposal may not be so frustrating. There are many goods that have been, time to time, shuffled to higher tax slabs. What if another moves into that slab. And then, after an initial shock, the market settles and finally things get back to normal. Here the case is not so. Shawl and crewel items don't make an industry in the sense we normally understand an industry. It is an organic activity -  a craft, and a way of lived-economy.

It is not some manufacturing unit, like that of BMW cars, that has a well laid out financial plan, and a systemic way of absorbing market shocks. Shawl weaving is intimately connected to ordinary human hands that feed ordinary human families.

The shock that the 28% tax slab will bring will not go to the market as much as it will travel to those families that feed on shawl making. It will simply devastate families across Kashmir. Those who think that shawl is a luxury item, hence liable to higher tax, have a very rough understanding of a thing that is so soft. This proposal is a smudge on the shawl!