Unique Features of Gst The Game Changer of The Indian Indirect Taxes

Abstract

The Goods and Services Tax (GST) in India was introduced with the slogan “One Nation - One Tax†based on the destination to overcome the inadequacies of the traditional taxing system by maintaining uniform tax rates all over the country. Small and medium enterprises (SME) faced lots of problems for adapting procedures of registrations, filing monthly returns and commencing tax audit for every financial year. That was solved by the introduction of the threshold limit of 40 lacs for manufacturers and 20 lacs for service providers depending upon the State in which they operate. Revenue neutral rates (RNR) fixed the tax structure by exempting essential commodities that were represented from the poor man’s basket like cereals, fruits, milk, vegetables, etc and levied higher tax rates on luxurious products. It reduced the cascading effect of tax by abolishing many of cesses and surcharges that were subsumed in the GST. A systematic mechanism for claiming input tax credit (ITC) has been introduced for tax on purchases through the electronic ledger and a special provision called the reverse charge mechanism (RCM) has also been introduced to claim tax from the unregistered dealers. Even though GST had such meaningful applications, the State Governments and the Governments of the Union Territories have been opposing it for the reason that their share of collected tax will be reimbursed by the Central Government at a later point of time. This article discusses the mechanism of GST in order to understand the technicalities with rigorous procedures that are complied by adapting various schemes, exemptions, technological aspects etc.