This paper focuses on the process of introducing the Goods and Services Tax (GST), bringing out the perspectives of different stakeholders and the contentious issues. The GST was expected to subsume a variety of taxes and simplify the indirect tax regime. The Empowered Committee (EC) was mandated in 2007, to bring about consensus among the States to move towards GST. The important stakeholders in the process were the Government of India, individual States, industry and the committees commissioned by the GoI or EC. However, the EC faced challenges since there were issues of control between the Centre and States, perceived loss of revenue by some States, extent of uniformity across various commodities and their tax rates, input credit mechanism and dispute settlement. The deadline for the introduction of GST kept getting postponed due to the slow resolution of the challenging issues. Finally, it was tabled in the Parliament as the 122nd Constitutional Amendment Bill (CAB) in December 2014. The Goods and Services Tax is a value added tax to be implemented in India, the decision on which is pending. GST is the only indirect tax that directly affects all sectors and sections of our economy. Ignorance of law is no excuse but is liable to panel provisions, hence why not start learning GST and avoid the cost of ignorance. Therefore, we all need to learn it whether willingly or as compulsion. The goods and services tax (GST) is aimed at creating a single, unified market that will benefit both corporate and the economy. The changed indirect tax system GST-Goods and service tax is planned to execute in India. Several countries implemented this tax system followed by France, the first country introduced GST. Goods and service tax is a new story of VAT which gives a widespread setoff for input tax credit and subsuming many indirect taxes from state and national level. The GST Implementation is not yet declared by government and the drafting of GST law is still under process and a clear picture will be available only after announcement of Implementation. India is a centralized democratic and therefore the GST will be implemented parallel by the central and state governments as CGST and SGST respectively. The objective will be to maintain a commonality between the basic structure and design of the CGST, SGST and SGST between states. In this paper, I have started with the introduction, in general of GST and have tried to highlight the objectives the proposed GST is trying to achieve. Thereafter, I have discussed the possible challenges and threats; and then, opportunities that GST brings before us to strengthen our free market economy.
Constitutional Amendment, Indirect Tax, Federalism, GST, CGST, SGST, VAT
