Washington: India’s transition to the GST regime has been “fairly smooth” despite attempts by “ill-informed” Opposition leaders to derail its implementation, finance minister Arun Jaitley has said.
The GST was implemented from July 1 this year. It brings the economy under a uniform tax regime.
Mr Jaitley, who is on a week-long visit to the US to attend the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, said under the GST the government has unveiled attractive schemes to ensure that the non-compliant in India become compliant.
“Many attempts have been made by political groups to derail the GST, but I am glad that their own state governments are not listening to them because they know 80 per cent of the money is going to come to them so they don’t have to appease an ill-informed central leader of the party and let the revenues of their own state suffer,” Mr Jaitley said.
“So, the state governments are being wiser,” Mr Jaitley said in response to a question during an event, titled “India’s market Reforms: The Way Forward”, organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry in association with the US Chambers of Commerce.
The obvious problem in the GST, he said, is going to be that the noncompliant are going to eventually come in to the net. “And therefore there are going to be different complaints — some legitimate some manufactured thrown up by the non- complaint how GST is creating a problem for them,” he said, adding that the government needs to have capacity to distinguish between a genuine and a manufactured complaint.
