Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Wednesday said he was hopeful of rolling out the Goods and Services Tax (GST) from July 1, which will make goods and services cheaper and tax evasion difficult.
The Minister said achieving a growth rate of 7-8 per cent was plausible, and if economies picked up globally, then the country’s growth rate could go up further.
Demonetisation, Mr. Jaitley said, would act as a disincentive towards continuing to deal with shadow economy, and the integration of informal with formal economy would increase the size of the GDP and make it cleaner.
“The biggest taxation reform what we are trying to implement from July 1 is GST. It will increase the volume of taxation, there is no tax on tax and, therefore, makes goods, commodities and services little cheaper and far more convenient,” Mr. Jaitley said at the 23rd Commonwealth Auditors General conference here.
Mr. Jaitley said the tax department was trying to make the IT backbone so strong so that evasion became difficult and hence only limited number of cases are taken up for scrutiny.
“The laws which enable this [GST] are now before Parliament, which hopefully should get cleared, and once they do get cleared, then by the middle of this year we hope to see the implementation as far as this law is concerned,” he said.
Once implemented, what is currently the most complicated tax system in the world would become one of the simplest tax system in the world.
The Union Cabinet this week cleared four supplementary GST legislation, which will be introduced in Parliament in the ongoing budget session.
As regards growth, Mr. Jaitley said India would continue to remain amongst the fastest growing economies of the world.
“For the last three years, we have been the fastest growing major economy, we will continue to be in that phase. I think for India to achieve the growth rate of 78 per cent is reasonably logically plausible. “If big growth returns to the world we probably can push upwards.”
