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Finance Minister Says Government Hopeful Of Rolling Out GST From July 1

Logical to say India will grow at the rate of 7-8%: Jaitley

 Finance Minister Arun Jaitley addressing a press conference (Photographer: Manvender Vashist/PTI)
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley addressing a press conference (Photographer: Manvender Vashist/PTI)

The government is hopeful of rolling out the Goods and Services Tax (GST) from July 1, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said.

“The biggest taxation reform what we are trying to implement from July 1 is Goods and Services Tax ... 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,” Jaitley said at the 23rd Commonwealth Auditors General conference in New Delhi.

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.
Arun Jaitley, Finance Minister

Once implemented, India’s tax system will transform from being the most complicated in the world to one of the simplest, Jaitley said.

The Union Cabinet this week cleared four supplementary GST legislation, which will be introduced in Parliament in the ongoing Budget session.

As regards growth, 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 7-8 percent is reasonably logically plausible. If big growth returns to the world we probably can push upwards,” he added.

Jaitley said the income tax department is trying to strengthen its backbone in such a way that evasion becomes difficult, and hence only limited number of cases are taken up for scrutiny.

On demonetisation, Jaitley said, it will act as a disincentive towards continuing to deal with shadow economy, and integration of informal with formal economy will increase the size of the GDP and make it cleaner.