The government is likely to introduce the Constitution Amendment Bill on GST in Lok Sabha early next week, as the Finance Ministry is gearing up to implement the tax measure from April 1 next year.
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Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said at a press conference on Thursday that public opinion had been strongly in favour of the reform.
Sources said many top leaders of the opposition like NCP’s Sharad Pawar and CPM’s Sitaram Yechury had already signed the petition drafted by Jairam Ramesh. Edelweiss, in a research note dated December 7, 2015 said, “Globally, GST has been structured as a destination-based comprehensive tax levied at a specified rate on sale and consumption of goods and services within a country”.
Jaitley said a balance will have to be stuck between reasonable tax rates and adequate funds for states to meet their developmental activities. While receiving support from the Congress on the GST Bill, officially termed as the Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill 2014, the NDA Government refused to yield to the former’s pressure to put a GST rate in the statute. Parliament and state legislatures will be having concomitant powers to make laws on GST.
The long-delayed Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill has finally received the Rajya Sabha nod on Wednesday.
GST should actually not have an impact on inflation as the new tax rate will be revenue neutral. He said about 60,000 officers will be trained across India and a wide outreach programme will be launched for trade and industry to understand the GST.
In what has been heralded as a historic step, this will bring in the country’s more than 1.25 billion people under a single market for the first time since Independence. Make in India programme would get a boost with improvement in ease of doing business, by doing away with multiple taxes and their cascading impact, according to PHD Chamber of Commerce Chief Economist and Director-Research S P Sharma.
GST will remove the multiplicity of taxes now in place in India and simplify the indirect tax regime in the country. It will also need to work on computer systems designed for the new tax.
Congress says it wants the rate capped at 18 percent of any purchase of goods or service to avoid what it calls “creeping taxation”.
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He said the bill and other related bills should be passed soon for its introduction from April 2017.
