GST Council meet: Congress to demand inclusion of petrol, real estate

The Congress will demand that cement, paints, varnishes and construction materials, and other mastics, painters' fillings also be brought under GST's ambit

At the meeting of GST Council on Thursday, the Congress will demand that petrol and petroleum products and real estate be brought within the ambit of the goods and services tax (GST).

 

Thursday’s meeting has an agenda running into over 320 pages, of which 80 pages were sent to state finance ministers barely 24 hours before the meeting, allowing little time for them to study the proposals, Punjab Finance Minister Manpreet Singh Badal said on Wednesday.

 

The Congress will demand that cement, paints, varnishes, and construction materials, like glaziers’ putty, grafting putty, resin cements, caulking compounds and other mastics, painters’ fillings, be brought under the GST ambit. These items are currently taxed at 28 per cent.

 

“Petrol and diesel prices are skyrocketing. The (Narendra) Modi government is profiteering at the expense of common man. To provide relief to the consumers, these should be brought under the GST,” Badal said.

 

Badal said the Congress finance ministers would also ask the Centre that e-way bills are introduced only after adequate preparedness. He said the changes proposed by the Centre “are also being rushed without wider consultations with all stakeholders”. “Our request is not to pass these changes at tomorrow's meeting, but circulate the proposed changes for consultations.”

 

At the meeting, the state Congress state finance ministers will also ask the Centre to not push through amendments in rules and laws, suggested by a sub-committee on law without adequate consultations with industry.

 

Apart from changes in rules and laws, the meeting also has on its agenda a list of items whose rates will be lowered, including mineral water that currently attracts a tax of 18 per cent. Badal said the sheer number of changes after the GST was rolled out in July, and the revisions and concessions undertaken, exceed the original. “The Bharatiya Janata Party government at the Centre has forced ‘instalment-based tinkering’ of GST rates, which is ad hoc and leading to chaos,” he said.

 

“I have not attended a single meeting of the GST Council so far where the agenda papers were not running into a few hundreds. I doubt even the finest students and practitioners of GST law will be able to follow all these mammoth changes,” Badal said, adding the agenda for Thursday’s meeting was the most copious of agendas presented in any GST Council meeting.

 

The Punjab minister said the Modi government had unleashed one of the most complex GST, and trade had not been able to file even one full cycle of returns. He said the experience of past few months had belied all the claims of the Centre at the time of the roll-out — gross domestic product has fallen, revenues have shown an alarming fall, inflation is increasing and there is furore at the complexities in compliances. “I understand most of the recommendations of the committee set up to suggest reforms have been overruled,” Badal said. He said the future scenario looked “scary”. “I shudder to think the extent of litigation that will arise due to ill-conceived provisions unleashed in a hurry.”

 

The minister said he was also worried about the decline in the revenues of Punjab. “Punjab has a gap of nearly 40 per cent in revenues and I don’t see that being met after the initial period of assured compensation is over.”

 

He said the hurried deadlines to meet mostly political goals, backed by high-voltage publicity, has put the nation at a stage where it will be very difficult to recover the lost ground. Badal said the case of GST roll-out was akin to somebody having erected a house that is full of flaws, and a mason needs to be called daily to fix something or the other.