RATIONALISATION OF SLABS WOULD BE ON AGENDA SOON: ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN

At the function to mark one year of

GST, outgoing Chief Economic Advisor

ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN was singled out by Union Minister Arun Jaitley, Finance Minister Piyush Goyal, and Finance Secretary Hasmukh Adhia, for his contribution and advice in implementing the tax. Speaking to Arup Roychoudhury on the sidelines of the event, Subramanian said that now that revenues have stabilised, the process of bringing down GST to a three-rate system should be sooner than expected.

What has been your biggest takeaway?

The biggest thing has been that despite all the teething troubles, GST surpassed my expectations in terms of how quickly it stabilised, how the system has responded and the actual revenue performance. And as finance minister Jaitley said, we can expect a lot more from this going forward.

How soon do you expect the Council to start working towards a simpler, possibly three-rate GST?

With the revenue snow stabilising, this should be happening sooner. This will possiblybe in the agenda of the G ST Council in the months to come.

Another thing that people now expect the G ST Council to do is to reach a consensus on items exempted so far.

That is something very difficult to predict. Ithink, and as people have said, we should begin with aviation turbine fuel and then gradually move ahead. I am hopeful. Of course the more oil prices are high, the easier it becomes to put petroleum products under GST.