Goods and Service Tax: A Comprehensive Indirect Tax Reform in India

This paper attempts to study Goods and Service Tax (GST) in the context of India, it is an ambitious indirect tax regime which will replace numbers of existing indirect taxes levied by Centre as well as States. GST will be single tax for the whole nation and will make India one unified market, GST has been proposed to implement from April 1, 2017. Effective implementation of GST will reduce the cascading effect of taxation, make easy compliance of taxation and remove the distortions in taxation system and also helps to boost National Manufacturing Scheme, Ease of Doing Business. GST is expected to increase GDP growth by 0.5% to 2% per annum. In this present study effort has been made to trace out the needs for and effective features of GST, dual GST model, input tax credit criteria, type and method of GST in Indian perspective, recommendations of GST Council on threshold limits, compensation criteria, dual control, GST rate structure, composition scheme. In this study research materials are based on authentic secondary sources mostly retrieved from official publications viz. Proposed GST model, GST Act, 2016 and news articles.