5-yr-old crushed by school bus
Rash driving claimed yet another life in the national capital region (NCR) on Saturday withafive-year-oldkindergarten child coming under the wheels of her school bus as she was alighting from the vehicle at Mehrauli near NH-24 in Ghaziabad.
Neighbours told HT that Saumya was getting down from the bus when the driver drove ahead to take a turn. The girl fell and her head came under the tyre. The bus was hired by the Silver Shine School at Mahendra Enclave in Ghaziabad and had arrived to drop Saumya home around 2pm.
“There have been two complaints against the bus driver by the girl’s mother but he always seemed to be in hurry,” said Saumya’s neighbour.
The school authorities, however, denied receiving any complaints against the driver as claimed.
The police said that they have booked driver Rajveer and conductor Manju.
The city administration officials said they will write to the regional transport department to conduct a surprise drive to check up the safety norms and the manner in which drivers drive the school buses. ››P3
Federal indirect tax body, the Goods and Service Tax (GST) Council, on Saturday raised the cess on medium sized-to-large cars and SUVs in the range of 2-7 percentage points but kept the tax burden lower than pre-GST levels.
The council also reduced the GST rate on about 30 commonly used products like dosa batter and rain coats as it sought to pass on benefit of better than expected revenue receipts under the twomonth-old tax regime to the consumer. The revised rates including the cess will be effective from the date they will be notified. Dried tamarind, custard powder, disposables and rubber bands are among other items on which tax rate has been reduced.
Finance minister Arun Jaitley said there was no change in the GST cess on small petrol and diesel cars, hybrid cars or on 13-seater vehicles. The cess on mid-segment cars will go up by 2, large cars by 5 and SUVs by 7 percentage points. The effective tax burden will be less than the preGST levels, he explained.
“The council decided that it is only in large vehicles, affordability of consumers is high. Accordingly, the cess has been increased by two, five and seven percentage points. Even then, the pre-GST rate has not been restored even though we had headroom for increasing by 10 percentage points,” said Jaitley.
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