TAXING GROWTH STORY

India's GST journey has reshaped indirect taxation, widened the tax base, and boosted collections. What does GST 2.0 promise next?

- By Ashish Sinha

IF THERE'S ONE REFORM that has defined India’s fiscal story in the last decade, it is the Goods and Services Tax. Announced with fanfare on July 1, 2017, GST was billed as “one nation, one tax, one market.” The idea was to replace the complex, cascading web of central excise, service tax, VAT, entry taxes, octroi, and local levies with a simplified system. The result was historic: for the first time since independence, a truly unified national indirect tax regime came into being.

The “why” of GST was as important as the “how.” Before GST, goods moved across India slower than they did across borders. Trucks stopped at multiple checkpoints, businesses filed dozens of state-specific returns, and tax cascading inflated consumer prices. GST promised to change that — by creating seamless input-tax credits across states, eliminating border levies, and widening the tax base through technology-driven compliance.

The implementation, of course, wasn’t without teething troubles. Small businesses struggled with compliance deadlines, software glitches plagued the GST Network (GSTN), and multiple rate slabs confused consumers. But year by year, the system matured, compliance improved, and collections soared — a sign that the tax base had widened and the economy was adjusting to its new fiscal backbone.

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