HTLS 2025: Nirmala Sitharaman Highlights Customs Reform as a Key Priority

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Saturday that the government’s next focus of reforms includes an overhaul of the custom duty system.

“We made sure that income tax is no longer a tiresome exercise,” she cited as an example, recalling that the I-T regime was often earlier termed “tax terrorism”. Sitharaman was speaking at the 23rd Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi on Saturday.

Live updates | What Nirmala Sitharaman said at HTLS 2025

“The commentary used to be that income tax rates are not the problem — ‘yes, we want lower and lower rates’ — but it is the tax administration which causes the problem,” the senior BJP leader said, in conversation with HT Editor-in-Chief R Sukumar. She said the administration of tax became “painful, sometimes agonising”, which resulted in the “not-so-nice coinage, tax terrorism”.

Watch | HT Leadership Summit 2025

She said the government has moved to a “faceless” income tax system — referring to a simplified, online system.

“Now the same virtues will have to be brought to customs,” she said, calling for transparency.

She acknowledged that smuggling of illegal goods is “still a serious problem”.

“We have brought down custom duties in the last two years steadily. Customs is the next big assignment,” she added.

Nirmala Sitharaman, an economist by training and an alumnus of Jawaharlal Nehru University, has served as a minister throughout PM Narendra Modi’s stint of 11 years and counting.

Her current role, as Finance and Corporate Affairs Minister, began after the 2019 election. In this capacity, Sitharaman has been the chief architect of India’s economic policy, steering the nation through the volatile period of the COVID-19 pandemic and championing structural reforms aimed at boosting investment, simplifying tax structures, and sustaining the country’s growth trajectory.

After the 2014 election, she became Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Commerce and Industry, and rose to become the Union Minister of Defence in 2017, before becoming Finance Minister.