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Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday said that the “switchover to GST” has been “reasonably smooth” and expressed confidence that initial glitches seen are “rectifiable” ones.
He also said that the GST Council, which will next meet this Saturday, will in the next few days finalise the entire mechanism of Anti Profiteering Authority envisaged in the GST framework. The GST Council will now meet at least once a month, he said.
Jaitley’s remarks on GST came exactly one month after India had introduced this biggest tax reform since independence.
He was replying to the nearly four-hour long discussion on the first batch of supplementary demand for grants for 2017-18 in the lower house on Tuesday.
The Lok Sabha later gave its nod for additional spend of ₹11,166 crore including cash outgo of ₹10,648 crore.
Of the additional spend of ₹11,166 crore, as much as ₹7,000 crore will go to the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas toward additional grants-in-aid for payment of differential royalty to State governments.
GST support The Centre also proposes to spend ₹1,800 crore towards budgetary support to the units in the States of Jammu & Kashmir, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and North-Eastern States including Sikkim under Goods & Services Tax (GST) regime.
The government is also looking to spend about ₹387 crore on activities related to Goods and Services Tax.
The lower house later approved relevant appropriation Bills for withdrawing sums out of the Consolidated Fund of India.
Jaitley said that the Opposition concerns over certain manufacturers and service providers not passing the benefits from lower tax incidence on GST was quite valid and indicated that the proposed anti-profiteering authority would address this matter.
“I do hope that just automobile sector had passed on the benefits and lowered prices, other industry segments would do so,” he said.
On ordinance factories, Jaitley assured the lower house that there was no plan on part of the government to privatise them or retrench the employees.
On demonetisation, he said that RBI will in the coming days make public declaration of the amount of demonetised notes that returned to the banking system and also the extent of fake currencies that were detected from such an exercise.
Even till July this year, there were demonetised money returning to the system (through the cooperative banks), Jaitley noted.
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