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“Locking in fixed tax brackets until 2031 means that as prices rise, people will be pushed into higher tax brackets without any real increase in their purchasing power or wealth,” said Barua, managing director of SMAC Advisory Services.

He also expressed concerns about fairness, saying that partial adjustments could disproportionately affect middle-income earners. “Global tax standards also emphasise vertical equity. If only the initial tax-free threshold is raised while higher slabs remain unchanged, it creates an unfair ‘middle-class squeeze’,” he said.

Barua added that predictability should be balanced with flexibility, arguing that “long-term fiscal certainty must be paired with proportional, inflation-linked adjustments across all income slabs, rather than rigidly fixed rates stretching to 2030–31,” to align with global norms.