The Highs And The Lows Of GST

Touted as one of the biggest economic reforms since independence, the Goods and Services Tax (GST) was supposed to replace the complex indirect tax system prevalent in the country with a more simplified, uniform regime. As it entered its third year in July 2019, what India has successfully achieved is the monumental restructuring of what former Finance Minister Arun Jaitley labelled as, “one of the world’s clumsiest indirect  tax systems.” Looking back at two years of its successful implementation, it can be argued that while India has come a long way from a complicated taxation system with over a dozen different taxes and many more cesses, GST is still far away from an ideal taxation regime. One of the biggest criticisms of GST, as we know it today, is the number of tax rates it has. In what was supposed to be a simple taxation system, one can now count as many...