GST Final Push- Will The Government Meet The April 2017 Deadline?

GST Infrastructure is a work in progress. The government will have to burn the midnight oil if it wants to meet the April 2017 deadline.

- Dipak Mondal

Navin Kumar, Chairman of GST Network, a not-for profit company set up to provide IT infrastructure and services for the proposed Goods and Services Tax, or GST, looks calm and composed. The calmness hides the difficult nature of the task he has on his hands.

Kumar and his team, working from the fourth floor of an office complex in Delhi’s Aerocity, are racing against time to build the IT platform on which businesses will register themselves, pay taxes and file returns after the GST comes into force. His team as well as the IT vendor, Infosys, are, in a way, shooting in the dark they are writing the software without knowing the final shape the GST law and rules will take. All they have to work with is a model law released on June 14 this year, which, too, will go through changes after suggestions from stakeholders.

“The release of the model GST law has meant more work for us. If the law had been finalised before the work was commissioned, it would have been easier for us. Since the two things are running parallel, it becomes a little difficult to incorporate the changes (in the software) as and when they are made,” say Kumar.

The implementation of GST, India’s most ambitious effort to simplify the indirect tax system, has been a work in progress for close to a decade. The law, supposed to be implemented from April 1, 2010, but delayed due to fighting between India’s two biggest political parties, got a new lease of life recently when the empowered committee of state finance ministers gave it an approval in principle. Now, with recent elections changing the numbers in the Rajya Sabha in favour of the ruling National Democratic Alliance, there is a chance that the GST Bill may be passed in the monsoon session of Parliament.