India moved to fewer GST slabs, but not yet ready for one rate: FM

New rates ease compliance and eliminate ambiguities

- PTI

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday said that while the government has moved to rationalise Goods and Services Tax (GST) slabs, the country is "not yet" prepared for a singlerate GST system, though it remains a possibility in the future.

At an event in Kolkata, she underlined that the four-rate GST structure of 5, 12, 18 and 28 per cent was not arbitrarily fixed, but arrived at through a detailed exercise of aligning diverse state-level taxes with the nearest slabs.

"When a review of GST was undertaken, one of the needs identified was that they (GST Council members) didn't want four rates. However, the question of whether they were ready to get into one rate situation as yet was answered with not yet. Maybe sometime in future," Sitharaman said.