Budget 2015: Goods and Services Tax planned from April 2016, says FM

Displaying the government's intent on implementing a new indirect tax regime for India, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Saturday announced that the proposed Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill will be implemented from April next year.

"We are committed to implementing a state of the art indirect tax system, the Goods and Services Tax, from April 1, 2016," Jaitley told the Lok Sabha while presenting the NDA government's first full Budget.

GST, by subsuming a large number of central and state taxes into a single tax, would mitigate cascading, or double, taxation in a major way and pave the way for a common national market.