SPECIAL GST ISSUE

It was recently decided by the AIFTP to bring out a special issue of AIFTP Journal dedicated to GST.

Goods and Services Tax was also termed as good and simple tax by our Honourable Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi ji.

I had termed it as Great Stress Test for our members, there were opinions for and against the new legislation any how it was implemented from 1-7-2017 with a great bang in the entire country with not so good portal and created lot of difficulties.

After more than one year of implementation of GST, if we look back and analyse we find that anything new out of our comfort zone is not easily acceptable by people.

If any new law or procedure particularly purely digital-based is introduced, it takes time for acceptance by the public at large including professionals. Government was alive to this situation and had visualised probable difficulties but could not gaze its enormity. However the GST council that was constituted on 15-9-2016 in past two years had 30 meetings and took 918 decisions and issued 294 notifications.

The GST council is the best example of federalism where the Centre and State Governments are working hand-in-hand with each other to resolve the difficulties, removing the glitches to make GST a success story.

It is manifest from the October 2018 collection of GST at ₹ 1,00,710/- Crore in itself is the example that GST has proved to be good law, bringing uniformity in local taxation all over the country and helped in curbing malpractices in business of purchasing goods from low tax area and selling in high tax area.

The systems evolved in GST shall have far reaching effects, it will put effective check on unaccounted business, prevent missreporting of turnover, in commercial tax and Income-tax. The immediate result is increase in the number of Income Tax returns, thus the benefit of direct tax collection is a bonus on GST in favour of the Government.

The honourable Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi Ji has announces new schemes to promote the MSME Sector, the most important is approval of loan up to ₹ 1 Crore for MSMES based on the GST and IT returns within 59 minutes and also 2% less interest subsession. Apart from other benefits, this is something as a direct result of GST implementation.

In this issue we have decided to incorporate articles from GST experts of AIFTP on various subjects lucidly explaining the law and clarifying the doubts in respect of classification and procedure for compliance.

The GST has helped our country to improve International ranking by 35 points to 77 in case of doing business.

I congratulate our editorial board and publication team for bringing out a special issue which will go a long way to help our members. We will endeavour to make it regular feature to balance our education system for direct and indirect taxes. I am sure it will be well taken by our members and they will appreciate the effort.

Ganesh N. Purohit
National President