GST: Present at the creation... and beyond

The story of India's fledgling indirect tax regime goes back a long way before 2000

Reader alert: This piece is a bit like a memoir in parts and, as a consequence, the dreaded pronoun ‘I’ appears rather too frequently.

A column in July 2017 has to be on the newly launched Goods and Services Tax (GST), indubitably the most significant and complex tax reform undertaken in independent India. So much has been written on its merits and demerits, there is nothing really new I can add, except to caution that we will only find out the true economic, social and administrative benefits and costs of this nation-wide overhaul of indirect taxes in the months and