Cabinet clears GST supplementary
legislations
The
Cabinet today cleared four supporting GST legislations,
paving the way
for their introduction in Parliament as early as today.
The four
supporting legislations the Compensation Law, the Central-GST
(C-GST),
Integrated-GST (I-GST) and Union Territory-GST (UT-GST) would
be
introduced as Money Bill, sources said.
The GST legislations have been cleared by the Cabinet.
These would be introduced in Parliament this week, could be
even today, a source said.
The GST legislations were the only agenda in today's meeting
of the Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra
Modi.
Sources
said the four legislations would be taken up for discussion
together in
Parliament. Once approved by Parliament, the states would
start taking
their SGST bill for discussion and passage in the respective
state
assemblies.
The GST Council, in its previous two meetings, had
given approval to the four legislations as also the State-GST
(S-GST)
bill. While the S-GST has to be passed by each of the state
legislative
assemblies, the four other laws have to be approved by
Parliament.
Passage of all the legislations would pave the way for
introduction of Goods and Services Tax (GST) from July 1.
The
government is hoping the C-GST, I-GST, UT-GST and the GST
Compensation
laws will be approved in the current session of Parliament and
the S-GST
by each of the state legislatures soon.
While a composite GST
will be levied on sale of goods or rendering of services after
the new
indirect tax regime is rolled out, the revenue would be split
between
the Centre and the states in almost equal proportion.
This is because central taxes like excise and service tax and
state levies like VAT will be subsumed in the GST.
While
the C-GST will give powers to the Centre to levy GST on goods
and
services after Union levies like excise and service tax are
subsumed,
the I-GST is to be levied on inter-state supplies.
The S-GST will
allow states to levy the tax after VAT and other state levies
are
subsumed in the GST. The UT-GST will also go to Parliament for
approval.
The
Council has already finalised a four-tier tax structure of 5,
12, 18
and 28 per cent, but the model GST law has kept the peak rate
at 40 per
cent (20 per cent to be levied by the Centre and an equal
amount by the
states) to obviate the need for approaching Parliament for any
change in
rates in future.
Similarly, the cess to be levied on top of peak
rate on selected demerit goods like luxury cars for creation
of a corpus
that will be used for compensating states for any loss of
revenue from
GST implementation in the first five years, has been capped at
15 per
cent.
PTI
