Three years ago, as I began researching for my doctoral dissertation on the Goods and Services Tax (GST), I had a premonition that the GST Council could very well be the Achilles’ heel of India’s biggest tax reform since independence. I did not expect, however, that the dismantling would begin before June 2022, when the statutorily mandated GST compensation period ends.
The rumblings of disenchantment have already begun. The finance minister of Tamil Nadu has lamented that the GST system is “badly designed and executed”; just a few weeks earlier, he also scoffed that a state like Goa, which has a far lesser population than Tamil Nadu, has an equal vote in the GST Council. West Bengal’s finance minister has argued that the GST Council’s meetings have become “acrimonious, vexing, and almost toxic with erosion of mutual trust that held fast between the state and the centre since the inception of the GST Council”.
Punjab’s finance minister has raised matters regarding “excessive delegation”, and Kerala’s new finance minister has claimed that the GST is “antithetical to federalism to begin
— source thewire.in | Ajitesh Kir | 09/Aug/2021