GST roll out on July 1: 'Look at 17-year old journey of Good and Services Tax

The Centre is going to implement the Goods and Services Tax (GST) from July 1, 2017. The successive governments took 17 years to bring unified tax system in the country.

The GST has a history dating back to February 1986, when the then finance minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh came out with a proposal for a  major overhaul of the excise taxation structure in the budget.

He said the goal of his proposal was to reduce the cascading effect of multipoint taxes. Later, In 2000, when former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had introduced the concept during a meeting with former RBI governors Bimal Jalan and C Rangrajan. 

Vajpayee had set up a committee under the supervision of the then West Bengal finance minister Ashim Das Gupta where former RBI governors -IG Patel, Bimal Jalan and C Rangrajan were the other members. 

Later, the Vajpayee government had formed a tasked committee under Vijay Kelkar in 2003 and asked to recommend tax reforms. 

When UPA-1 took over the reign at Centre, the then finance minister P Chidambaram had expedited the implementation of GST. 

Here is the sequence of events which has made this single tax system possible-

2006-Chidambaram pitched GST in budget speech 

2008-Empowered committee of state finance ministers was constituted

2009-Empowered committee releases first 

2011-Former finance minister prana mukherjee introduced GST bill in Lok Sabha 

2013 August-Parliamentary standing committee submitted report

2014-Another revised bill drafted incorporating discussions 

December-2014-FM Arun Jaitley introduces Constitution Amendment Bill for GST

2015 May-Lok Sabha passes Constitution Amendment Bill for GST

2015 August-Congress remained firm on capping GST rate at 18%

2016 July-Centre , state be of the same opinion against capping GST rate

2016 August-Parliament clears 122 Constitution amendment bill

2016 November 03-GST Council agreed on four slab structure-5, 12, 18 and 28 percent-along with a tax on luxury goods

2016 November 04-GST Council meeting failed to draw consensus as Centre, state disagreed on GST administrative issue on ‘dual control’

2016 November 12-GST council failed to agree on CGST and SGST laws

2016 December-An accord established on both laws

2017 Jan 03-States demanded corpus compensation to be raised from 55000 cr to 90,000 cr to dilute the loss of note ban

2017 Jan 16- Centre, state agreed on two contentious issue-dual control and taxing rights of goods through high seas

2017-February 18-GST council finalised draft of compensation bill

2017 March 4- GST Council approved CGST and IGST bills

2017, March 20-Cabinet approved CGST, IGST and UT GST and Compensation bills

2017 March 27-Finance minister Jaitley tabled CGST, IGST, UT GST and Compensation bills