GST In India – Reflections Of Five Years

Recently, when called upon to write on the completion of 5 years of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime in India, the country’s Finance Minister (FM), Ms. Nirmala Sitharaman, stated, “GST has emerged strongly after facing turbulence from the Covid-19 global pandemic and its fallout.

It is to the credit of the GST Council that the Centre and the states held each other’s hand to face the crisis and lift our economy onto the path of recovery. It is this working together that has made India stand out now as the fastest growing economy, as projected by many, this year and the next.”

Is India’s GST a Tax Reform?

When introducing the Constitution Amendment Bill on GST in India’s Parliament in 2015, it was then touted as revolutionary tax reform.

Without a doubt, there have indeed been many positives in the past five years since the introduction of GST, and no debate is required over it. A few of them have been real standouts, such as –

• Subsuming (merging) multiple Central and State levies into a single tax and fungibility of tax credits for utilization,
• Abolition of check posts at State borders,
• Electronic waybills for tracking the physical movement…