India’s simple average tariff stood at 15.8% in 2025, according to World Trade Organization data.
Several experts have called for lower tariffs to improve the competitiveness of domestic manufacturers amid rising global uncertainties.
“The rationalisation is continuing, and we will keep it up,” she said in response to a question on tariff reforms, after delivering the CD Deshmukh memorial lecture at the National Council of Applied Economic Research in the capital.
In the budget for 2026-27, Sitharaman announced a series of basic customs duty exemptions to strengthen energy security and boost civil and defence aviation manufacturing. She also proposed allowing eligible manufacturing units in special economic zones to sell goods in the domestic tariff area at a concessional duty.
Viksit BharatIn her lecture, Sitharaman said financial institutions, governance structures and public resources “must widen the circle of opportunity, so that enterprise in India is augmented by both ability and access”. Our banks, she said, are for all Indians. So, banking must continue to be an instrument of inclusion, ensuring that aspiration finds support rather than barriers. Sitharaman said the vision of Viksit Bharat by 2047 is not an abstract aspiration but one that envisages zero poverty, universal access to quality education and affordable healthcare, skilled youth with meaningful employment, greater participation of women in economic activity, global leadership in technology and India becoming the world’s food basket.
“India at 100 years of Independence is not the conclusion of a journey. It is a milestone within a much larger and longer civilisational continuum,” she said.
To achieve that vision, India must dismantle the remnants of its colonial mindset and “reject the psychology of victimhood”, she added.
Vision for India
Sitharaman said India’s destiny is to become a developed civilisation that “combines prosperity with trusteeship, enterprise with responsibility, innovation with civilisational wisdom, global leadership with cultural rootedness, environmental stewardship with economic progress, and individual success with collective welfare”.
That destiny is not preordained but will be shaped by the “choices we make, the institutions we strengthen, our civilisational roots and the legacy we leave”, she said.
Sustained collective effort would ensure that India becomes prosperous without becoming consumerist, wealthy without becoming materialistic and globally successful without losing its civilisational character, she said. “Our model is neither consumerist nor mercantilist, as wealth has meaning only when it strengthens society as a whole,” she said.
She added that wealth and resources carry obligations to society and future generations.
“We may enjoy what we inherit, but we, as trustees, are not entitled to exhaust it,” she said.
The true measure of India’s progress, Sitharaman said, would be whether each generation leaves behind a stronger, wiser, more compassionate and more capable nation than the one it inherited.