Noting that the efforts of the Empowered Committee of State Finance Ministers have been fruitful, Amat said GST was an important milestone in the reforms of indirect taxes in India and Government of Odisha is in favour of GST.
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Chidambaram said, “It’s a half promise”.
Let’s not count our eggs before they hatch as the legislation requires 50 per cent of the states to approve it and the implementation date is set for April 1, 2017. “We hope that it will be a financial bill and there will be a discussion on it and we will be given the right to vote on it”.
“We suspect that the government could bring both the bills as money bills so that there is no debate in Rajya Sabha” where it does not have a majority, he said.
His remarks came a day after Rajya Sabha passed a bill to amend the Constitution, paving the way for the reform that aims to replace various local and central taxes with a single tax.
He also said that the tax rate would be decided by the GST Council with Union Finance Minister and representatives of all 29 states.
GST, which will subsume over a dozen central and state levies including excise duty, service tax and VAT, was recently passed by Rajya Sabha.
Noting that industry has been hopeful for this reform for nearly a decade, Aghi said USIBC commends India’s political leaders in their commitment towards growing the economy and ensuring predictability and tax certainty for the global investment community.
Where the auto industry is concerned, GST will only need to be paid by the automaker at the time of dispatch of goods as GST is destination based tax.
The passage of the GST bill has been hailed as a “breakthrough” in a long battle to unify India’s economy to attract FDI and create jobs.
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During this process, the government will need to engage with industry bodies, traders, service providers and nearly every local trade bodies and associations for the training and the acceptance of the new tax regime. This is known as Integrated GST (IGST). It is not a step taken by the welfare state, which has to think about the welfare of common man.
