Haryana, Maharashtra ratify GST Bill

Chandigarh/ Mumbai, August 29

Assemblies of both Haryana and Maharashtra unanimously ratified a Constitution Amendment Bill to introduce the Goods and Services Tax on Monday.

In Haryana, Finance Minister Capt Abhimanyu introduced the Bill, which was passed after a brief debate.

Participating in the discussion, Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader Kiran Chaudhary asked the government protect the interests of small and medium business enterprises who may be impacted after GST is implemented.

She also suggested the threshold for the tax should be increased from Rs 20 lakh to Rs 25 lakh.

"GST Bill is a Congress's baby and it is a simplified tax. But it has a lot of clauses," she said.

Chaudhary asked the state government it planned to make for an estimated Rs 9,000 crore the tax would cause.

Congress MLA Karan Dalal asked the state government to clarify which authority will resolve inter-state tax disputes.

The BJP has 47 of 90 MLAs in the 90-member Haryana Assembly House; INLD has 19; Congress 17 (including HJC, which merged with the party); and one each of BSP and Shiromani Akali Dal. There are also five Independent lawmakers.

Credit War

Debates over who should be given credit for the Bill began in Maharashtra Assembly on Monday, where the Congress accused the BJP’s state government of taking accolades for the measure. 

Finance Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar said the GST Bill would abolish as many as 17 different types of taxes and lead to lowering of inflation.

"Transparency would increase and corrupt practices will be curbed and having a common tax structure would benefit the country's economy. In Maharashtra, the manufacturing and services sectors would get a boost due to GST," he said.

He pointed out that GST would help eliminate the competition among states for levying taxes and such a tax is already implemented in 125 countries around the world.

Mungantiwar rejected the contention that it will fuel inflation or entail losses for civic bodies and said the government would ensure it would not suffer loss of a single paise.

Participating in the debate, Leader of Opposition in the assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil (Congress) asked the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena alliance "not to grab credit for GST which was brought by the UPA Government in 2010".

"The NDA government at the Centre is creating a misleading impression that it is doing something new for the country. However, it was the then Congress Finance Minister P. Chidambaram who had brought the GST Bill as part of the Congress's 'One Country, One Tax' policy initiative. So the BJP should refrain from taking the credit for it," he argued.

He added that the Congress had been attempting to bring in the GST since the past five years, but it was stalled by the BJP and the legislation languished.

"This is belated wisdom which has dawned on the BJP. It's become a fashion these days to ask what the Congress-UPA did in the past 60 years. The GST was one of the significant achievements of the Congress. The BJP is merely doing copy-paste-rename of schemes and programmes of the Congress," Vikhe-Patil said.

Leader of Opposition in the Council Dhananjay Munde (NCP) said that when Narendra Modi was Gujarat chief minister, he had staunchly opposed GST and now as Prime Minister, he is pleading for the same GST brought by the Congress.

"However, in the larger interest of the state, we are supporting GST," Munde declared.

The GST Bill has already been ratified by several states, including Assam, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Nagaland, with more states like Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Goa expected to follow suit soon.

Considered the biggest tax reform in India, the Bill seeks to convert India into a single tax regime. — Agencies