The Sugar Development Fund was set up in 1982 to provide financial help for development of sugar industry. The Centre levies the cess, collected as an excise duty, of Rs124 per quintal on the sweetener produced by any factory in the country. The cess, collected from sugar mills, is deposited in Sugar Development Fund (SDF) managed by the food ministry. The finance ministry wants to subsume some cesses under GST, which is why it has proposed to do away with the sugar cess under SDF. In recent years, SDF has been used to finance various interventions of the government to deal with the crisis in the sugar industry.

Source: Mint January 29, 2017 07:28 UTC