The Government adopted unconventional methods to educate stakeholders and ensure a smooth rollout of GST. These included the week-long ‘masterclasses’ held by Revenue Secretary Hasmukh Adhia and his team. In a quick chat with BusinessLine , Adhia says that the initiatives have helped and the initial feedback has been positive. Excerpts :

Slightly over a month into GST, do you think there are certain things that could have been handled differently?

We have tried our best to do what we could. Because of lot of advance planning as well as massive information dissemination, the roll out of GST has been smoother than expected. I cannot recall anything in which one has got any regret in terms of act of omission or commission.

The entire process has to be treated as one of evolving. As Sanjeev Sanyal Principal Economic Advisor said “There is no perfect system…you use feedback and adapt along the way.” This appears to be the way GST has been introduced. How has been the feedback so far?

Yes. For any process to settle down, you require sometime. However, what is essential is for the government to be alert to the situation and to keep responding to fix the flaws. The feedback from people has been very positive so far. Very soon, people would start accepting the GST as a way of live.

How frequent should there be review of tax fitments under GST? Can you please elaborate what is the basis on which tax fitments are being made?

The rate revision should not be frequent. But, initially, if there are major gaps noticed in pre-GST and post-GST rate of taxation, the GST Council has to correct them. The Fitment Committee uses objective criteria for rate revision. The most primary criteria for revision is the calculation of pre-GST and post-GST tax rate. Our approach is to maintain the present incidence of taxation on every commodity initially so as to have revenue neutral position.

Is the consumer actually gaining from GST? This is something everyone is asking.

The prices of many commodities are already showing a downward trend. However, in the first few months of implementation, it takes time for manufacturers to recalibrate their pricing based on calculation of input tax credit availability. We hope that a clear trend will emerge in six months.

Given the confusion created by social media, do you think the Government needed to step up its communication skills?

In any tax reform of this magnitude, there would always be disgruntled elements, whose interest is being affected. Such group of people tried to spread negative messages on the social media. One of the success of the Government’s efforts is in the fact that we have been very quick in quelling such false propaganda using the same social media. As far as grievance redressal is concerned, we have kept multiple mechanisms. There are help centres and call centres of Central and State governments, e-mail facility and even a Twitter handle to get immediate response to your queries.

In addition, based on the questions received on e-mail and Twitter, we derived frequently asked questions and put replies to them in the form of full page or half page advertisements. The sectoral FAQs on certain sectors such as e-commerce, MSME, drugs and pharmaceuticals etc. are also issued by way of advertisement in all regional as well as English and Hindi newspapers.

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