New Delhi, October 29: Taking serious note of a writ petition filed by two NLU Delhi students alleging that food delivery aggregator, Foodpanda India Ltd. was levying an inflated Value Added Tax on unsuspecting customers using its services, the Delhi High Court has directed the Delhi government to look into the matter.
A Single Bench of Justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw has given the Department of Trade and Taxes three weeks to act on the complaint, while telling it to keep the Court abreast of probe results. The Department was told to take action in three months if the allegations were found to be true. Saurabh Kochhar, CEO, Foodpanda India, said the company had not received any notification about the Delhi High Court ordering a probe into alleged inflation of food bills by the Company. “There is no notification that we have received regarding this,” he was quoted as saying.
Pranav Jain and Aroon Menon ( the petitioners), who are final year students at National Law University, Delhi are the founders of the website www.kitnatax.com which was launched on May 18, 2015 .The website is an aid to computing the exact amount which is payable at the end of a meal ordered in a restaurant or delivered to the doorsteps. An application or app by the name of Kitna Tax has also been launched.
The petitioners, through their representative, former Union Minister and Senior Advocate, P Chidambaram, explained that “over the course of time and usage of the website and application (app), it was discovered that numerous customers of Foodpanda website or app were being charged taxes that were wrongly calculated leading to customers paying more than was actually required as per law.”
Upon ordering from two different eateries on Foodpanda, the petitioners found that the VAT on both the occasions had been wrongly worked out. Instead of calculating the tax as a percentage of the sub-total, it had been determined on an amount that included the sub-total and the service tax.
The students contended that they had complained about the matter to Foodpanda but when their pleas fell on deaf ears, they had decided to approach the court.