FM Nirmala Sitharaman’s Impassioned Reply To Query On GST In Rajya Sabha

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman Tuesday said the GST Council is working on rationalising rate slabs under the Goods and Services Tax. “GST Council has gone into great details of looking item by item by item to see where rate reduction can happen. And equally, four rates or three rates or two rates or collapse into one rate is also being discussed,” Sitharaman said while replying to a question in the Rajya Sabha. In an impassioned address, the Finance Minister said, “Every finance minister from every state is doing their maximum best so that GST can become simpler and lesser in terms of compliance difficulties,” adding that the narrative that indirect tax rates have risen after the introduction of GST is false, and instead, rates have come down from when the GST was introduced in 2017. “At the point of GST's introduction, on an average, 15.8% tax could have been levied without additionally burdening the consumer. If that was the rate at which the GST rates were brought in, today, the rate has come down to 11.3%,” the FM said.