Congress will extend support to the GST bill only after concerns raised by it have been addressed, party’s chief whip in the Lok Sabha Jyotiraditya Scindia said today. “The government has not yet come to us. They have to come to us with concrete wording that all our concerns have been taken care of,” he said. Scindia said the Congress has been demanding that the overall GST rate be capped at 18 per cent and additional one per cent tax for compensating the manufacturing states be scrapped. The party also wants a dispute resolution mechanism in the proposed law. “We have no problem in passage of the law provided these concerned are addressed. But the problem is that the government talks of opposition support but it never come to us with anything concrete.
“They need to address these concerns and tell us that see this has been taken care of. Then, of course we will provide support to it. After all, it was the Congress party only that had mooted this GST about seven years ago. We would like to pass it through,” he told PTI. The Goods and Services Tax is a single indirect tax which will subsume most of the central and state taxes such as Value Added Tax (VAT), excise duty, service tax, central sales tax, additional customs duty and special additional duty of customs. A bill seeking to amend the Constitution and subsequent roll out of the GST is pending in Parliament for want of political consensus. The Centre has already missed the earlier deadline of April 1, 2016 to implement the proposed tax regime.
PTI