NDA (II) 2018 General Ability Test · Question 146 of 146

Correct — A, the Ministry of Culture. Seva Bhoj Yojana was launched by the Ministry of Culture on 1 August 2018, barely a month before this paper was set, which is why the stem says introduced recently. The scheme reimburses the Central Government's share of the Central GST and the Integrated GST paid on raw ingredients — ghee, edible oil, atta, maida, rava, flour, rice, pulses, sugar and jaggery — that go into food, prasad, langar or bhandara distributed free by charitable religious institutions. Temples, gurudwaras, mosques, churches, dharmik ashrams, dargahs, matths and monasteries are all eligible, and it is the Ministry of Culture that registers them and processes their claims. The initial outlay was ₹325 crore across 2018-19 and 2019-20.

• (b)The Ministry of Home Affairs — The Ministry of Home Affairs does deal with religious and charitable bodies in one respect — it administers the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, under which such organisations register to receive foreign funds. That is regulation of their money coming in, not reimbursement of tax on the food they give out.
• (c)The Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution — The word Food in the ministry's name is the trap. Its business is the public distribution system, foodgrain procurement and the food subsidy — a supply operation for households, not a tax reimbursement to religious institutions.
• (d)The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment — That ministry's mandate covers the welfare of Scheduled Castes, other backward classes, senior citizens, persons with disabilities and those affected by substance abuse. Charitable religious institutions do not fall under it.

Once the Goods and Services Tax replaced the earlier indirect taxes in July 2017, institutions that give food away free found themselves paying tax on the ingredients with no output on which to claim credit — a burden that had not existed in the same form before. Seva Bhoj Yojana is the government's answer: rather than exempting these purchases from GST, which would have required a Council decision and complicated the input-credit chain, the scheme leaves the tax in place and returns the Centre's share of it as a budgetary reimbursement afterwards.

Scheme-to-ministry items are among the most frequent in the GAT, and the reliable method is to ask which ministry's core subject the scheme touches, not which word in its name matches the scheme's description. Here the ministries named for food and for social welfare both look right on a keyword reading and are both wrong, while the Ministry of Culture — the one with charitable religious institutions in its remit — is the answer. Two of the paper's other current-affairs items in this stretch come from the same few months of 2018, so this section rewards a candidate who revised the year's scheme launches as a set.

• Seva Bhoj Yojana was launched by the Ministry of Culture on 1 August 2018.
• It reimburses the Central Government's share of CGST and IGST on raw ingredients used for food, prasad, langar or bhandara distributed free.
• Eligible bodies include temples, gurudwaras, mosques, churches, dharmik ashrams, dargahs, matths and monasteries.
• The initial outlay was ₹325 crore for the financial years 2018-19 and 2019-20.

• Matching a scheme to a ministry by a shared keyword; the ministry with Food in its title is not the one here.
• Assuming any tax measure must belong to the Ministry of Finance; the reimbursement is budgeted and run by the sponsoring ministry.
• Forgetting that only the Centre's share of the tax is returned, not the whole of it.

Asked as a scheme-to-ministry mapping item with two keyword-plausible ministries planted as distractors.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Under Seva Bhoj Yojana, what exactly is reimbursed to an eligible institution?

  • (a)the full cost of the raw ingredients
  • (b)the Central Government's share of CGST and IGST paid on specified raw items
  • (c)the wages of the kitchen staff
  • (d)the entire GST, both Central and State

  Answer(b) the Central Government's share of CGST and IGST paid on specified raw items — the tax is paid first and returned afterwards.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Integrated GST is levied on

  • (a)supplies within a single state
  • (b)inter-state supplies and imports
  • (c)exports only
  • (d)supplies by unregistered dealers

  Answer(b) inter-state supplies and imports — collected by the Centre and later apportioned between the Centre and the destination state.