History

An empowered committee was set up by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 2000.
In his budget speech on 28 February 2006, P. Chidambaram, the then Finance Minister,
announced the target date for implementation of GST to be 1 April 2010 and formed
another empowered committee of State Finance Ministers to design the roadmap.
][12]

Salient features of Goods and Service Tax, bill [13]

The salient features about this legislation were first time discussed in its first discussion
paper in year 2009.
(i) The GST shall have two components: one levied by the Centre (hereinafter referred to
as Central GST), and the other levied by the States (hereinafter referred to as State GST).
(one for CGST and SGST statute for every State).
(ii) The Central GST and the State GST would be applicable to all transactions of goods
and services except the exempted goods and services, goods which are outside the
purview of GST .

Model Draft GST Law [18]

The draft GST law proposed in the parliament indicates all the entities that lie under the
GST Bill. The GST bill comes directly under the Central government and there are
certain procedure that are meant to provide feasible condition for the taxpayer. The power
to grant exemption from the tax between the states and the central government is well
explained in the draft bill. The Central Goods and Services tax grants power to the
officers to discharge their duties under the GST Act.

Tax-Rate under the proposed GST

[19]

Although rates would come down, tax collection would go up due to increased tax
elasticity. The government is working on a special IT platform for smooth
implementation of the proposed Goods and Services Tax (GST).

Renewed GST concerns

With heterogeneous State laws on VAT, the debate on the necessity for a GST has been
reignited[20][citation needed]. The best GST systems across the world use a single GST, while
India has opted for a dual-GST model. Critics claim that CGST, SGST and IGST are
nothing but new names for Central Excise/Service Tax, VAT and CST, and hence GST
brings nothing new to the table. The concept of value-added has never been utilised in the
levy of service, as the Delhi High Court is attempting to prove in the case of Home
Solution Retail, while under Central Excise the focus is on defining and refining the
definition of manufacture, instead of focusing on value additions. The Revenue can be
very stubborn when it comes to refunds, as the Maharashtra Government proves, and
software entities that applied for refunds on excess service tax paid on inputs
discovered[citation needed].[17]