Union Finance minister Arun Jaitley today moved four GST Bills for consideration and passage in the Lok Sabha.
"The four bills are being taken together because the matter of the bills are same," Jaitley said while introducing the bills.
"Before the constitutional amendment, under the indirect tax regime Centre had right for implementing some taxes.... The discussion had been on for long for uniform tax system under which states and the Centre will share the tax collection," he said.
The Central Goods and Services Tax (CGST) Bill, 2017, along with three other GST Bills -- Compensation Law, Integrated-GST (IGST) and Union Territory-GST were moved for consideration in the Lower House.
Jaitley said that the tax rates will be kept at the current levels so as not to have any inflationary impact.
The Finance Minister said the aim of the GST Council is to decide everything relating to the tax structure with consensus and this is for the first time that such an arrangement has been made, based on the principle of shared sovereignty of both the Centre and the state governments.
"These are revolutionary bills which will benefit all. States have pooled in their sovereignty into the GST council, and Centre has done the same," he said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and several senior members of the Union Cabinet were present in the House when the four
bills were taken up for consideration and passage.
Explaining the bills, he said the Central GST or CGST will give powers to the Centre to levy tax after levies of excise, service tax and additional customs duty is subsumed.
The Integrated GST or IGST will be a tax to be levied by the Centre on inter-state movement of goods and services.
The States will pass the State GST or SGST law that will allow them to levy sales tax after levies like VAT are subsumed.
Besides, GST compensation law allows for imposition of cess on certain luxury goods like tobacco, high-end cars and aereated drinks to create a corpus for compensating states for any loss of revenue in the first five years of GST roll out.
The fourth law introduced is on Union Territory GST or UTGST for UTs like Chandigarh and Daman and Diu which do not have assemblies.
Jaitley said all decisions on GST would be taken by the GST Council, reflecting the federal structure.
With PTI Inputs
