But since it was amended in the RS, where the ruling BJP does not have the required strength, it had come back to the LS for ratification.
Advertisement
“For initial 1-2 years, a lot of accounting and training companies will also be able to create job opportunities specialising in implementation of GST”, executive search firm GlobalHunt MD Sunil Goel said, adding that sectors like manufacturing, FMCG, e-commerce, telecom, automotive and media will be major ones to benefit and will generate more jobs. The Bill needs to be ratified by half of the assemblies to become a law. “The process of building consensus slowed the progress on the Bill”.
“GST will ensure one tax in the entire country”. “That is why the discussion should not focus on who won and who lost”. We’ve worked out the differences. “Everybody should be congratulated and appreciated”, he said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his hour-long intervention, hailed the bill, which would end “tax terrorism”, while proving to be an effective tool to curb black money. We inherited the legacy of poverty, but we all desire to fight poverty.
He, however, virtually ruled out an assurance that the GST legislation will not be brought as Money Bill, a key demand of opposition Congress. The GST rate can be lowered only when the government keeps exemptions to the minimum and subsumes all taxes.
Chidambaram said there is a lot of work to be done to finalise the GST tax structure. “Small businesses and consumers will benefit the most”, Modi said. Maybe, there also exists a trust deficit between the Centre and States.
Speaking to reporters before the panel discussion, Subbarao said it is hard and premature to speculate on what would happen on this front, but expressed confidence that the tax bureaucracy, both at the Centre and state, have the capacity to implement GST.
“This (Constitution Amendment Bill) is an enabling amendment”.
These formalities apart, the parliament will have to pass relevant bills for a Central GST and an integrated GST, while the states will have to enact their own legislations for a State GST. “If there had been political consensus in 2011, this Bill would have been passed then”. “Rajasthan government is responsible for the killings”, Pramod Tiwari said.
He agreed with the opposition’s view that indirect taxes were regressive because under it the rich and the poor got taxed at the same rate, and so should be reduced. The new tax design must be clean to eliminate the cascade of indirect taxes that products bear now and allow manufacturers to claim credit for all the taxes paid on inputs across the value chain, creating a built-in incentive to pay tax.
The bovines died due to starvation and many of them getting caught neck-deep in cow dung and fodder that had turned slushy due to rainwater seepage, Tiwari said, adding that there was five-feet deep “daldal” (muddy puddle) at the cow shelter.
Advertisement
Another prickly issue the government would have to handle in coming days would be to balance the GST rate with revenue earnings of the states. In fact, Kerala’s finance minister Thomas Isaac had reportedly wanted the standard GST rate to be fixed at 24 per cent during the meeting of the Empowered Committee of State Finance Ministers on July 25.
