Remembering Arun Jaitley on sixth anniversary of GST

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

GST is acclaimed as the biggest taxation reform since independence. This has now been borne out of results achieved in the last 6 years of its implementation. The average growth rate of Gross GST revenue for the period 2018-19 to 2022-23 is 12.3% against the nominal GDP growth rate of 9.8%.

Normally the tax buoyancy of indirect tax is 1, which means its growth rate coincides with that of Nominal GDP growth rate. To achieve a tax buoyancy of 1.25 in a new tax is the reason for celebration. The buoyancy of subsumed taxes in the five years of pre-GST period was only 0.72%.

Apart from the difference GST made to the kitty of States and the Centre, GST has yielded huge benefit to our businesses in terms of removing artificial trade barriers and reducing logistic costs. Also by removing cascading of tax the overall incidence of tax burden on the consumers has come down. The digitised system of GST filing has stopped tax evasion in both GST and Income Tax.

The phenomenal growth in individual income tax recently can be attributed to this. While the country is celebrating 6th anniversary of GST, I would like to remember the contribution made by Late Shri Arun Jaitley in implementing GST. As Revenue Secretary from Sept 2015 till November 2018, I was a direct witness of his leadership style which gave us a success.

Of course the strong political will of Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi played a major role in the role out of GST. I am now going to narrate the leadership style of Mr Jaitley that worked in this reform. Mr Jaitley had a winning personality.

Very suave, very gentle, very generous, and very articulate. He had no enemies. I was floored by the amount of respect he commended from one and all, including from opposition