The Tug Of The VAT - Are Bread And Rusk The Same?

Rusk and bread. Two foods that are easily accessible, neither a standout material though. Both stay put in your pantry without making much noise and come to use when you want toast for breakfast or a snack with your tea. But what if we tell you that a case involving rusk and toast went on for 12 years in a High Court and even after all those years, there seems to be no real conclusion in sight!

In a case that was filed in the year 2010 by SS Food Kather, there was a question raised on the VAT (Value Added Tax) levied upon rusk. It took the Himachal Pradesh High Court that rusk and bread cannot be differentiated and hence the former should be exempted of tax like the latter. The HC ruled that since there was only a minuscule difference between both the products in terms of ingredients and the procedure to make them, they would be under the same tax bracket. But if you think this more than a decade long case was the end of the bread war, stop because this gets trickier as another High Court gets involved in it!

 Earlier this year, the Meghalaya High Court said in a hearing that rusk and bread can absolutely not be equated as both are very different from each other. A person going to the market to buy a loaf of bread would not end up buying a packet of rusk in the absence of the former, which is the thumb rule of deciding replacement products. So, the HC ruled that since the two food items differ, rusk and bread are not qualified to be in the same tax bracket. As a result of this ruling, rusk cannot be VAT exempted.

Now, a very basic question arises. What is the actual difference between bread and rusk? Well, bread is a yeasted and baked food item that is soft and pillowy in texture. While rusk is a baked biscuit that has a hard texture. While bread is baked in the oven once, rusk is baked twice to make it crunchy. Bread is a far more versatile food that can be made into several other dishes while rusk is a standalone snack that has very limited scope of being used to cook other items. But the basic ingredients of both rusk and bread remain more or less similar including the yeast and the dough. So, while there are differences to substantiate the ruling of the Meghalaya High Court, the judgement of the Himachal Pradesh HC is also right in its own way.

Our verdict on this predicament? Life is too short to pick a side, especially between two equally luring breakfast options. Buy a packet of each, bread and rusk, and have them both for your breakfast!