Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Tuesday that he was willing to reach out to the Congress on the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill, but added the party that ruled India for almost half-a-century must not pursue a model that would create a defective tax regime.
The government is keen on getting the Constitution (Amendment) Bill passed in the winter session of Parliament that begins on Thursday so as to meet its April 2016 target date for rolling out the indirect tax regime.
“It would be unfair to the country to impose, in the name of compromise, a defective GST,” Mr. Jaitley said in his valedictory address at an annual event of Assocham here.
“I will expect the party which ruled India for almost half-a-century to reconsider some of the suggestions. Some of their suggestions are not in the larger interests of GST,” he said. At the same time, he stressed that he was willing to discuss their concerns with them and had “no difficulty in reaching out” to the Opposition.
Mr. Jaitley termed “preposterous” the Congress’s suggestion to incorporate the tariff rates for GST in the Constitution (Amendment) Bill as it would create a “flawed architecture” for the tax. He also questioned the Congress’s stance on changing the dispute resolution mechanism, arguing that none of these positions was part of the Bills moved by P. Chidambaram and Pranab Mukherjee when they were Finance Ministers in the UPA government.
Terror threat
Mr. Jaitley, who recently returned from a G20 meeting in Turkey that was overshadowed by the Paris attacks, said the Islamic State had the potential to destabilise the global economy and impact investment flows and poverty alleviation.
“The IMF has been revising its global growth forecasts for the last two years. Now, patchy signs of growth are appearing around the world, and are then being overtaken by geopolitical factors that pose a challenge to the stability,” he said. “Which part of the world is safe itself will become a big question,” he said.
IS shadow
“In the past few months, the IS’s activities have an impact on global economy that can’t be underrated. Global resources will now be increasingly diverted to security measures… IS attacks will impact global currency, trade and tourism,” he said.
