India's GST Needs More Than a Tax Rate Reset
Welcome to India Edition, I’m Menaka Doshi. Join me each week for a ringside view of the billionaires, businesses and policy decisions behind India’s rise as an emerging economic powerhouse.
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This week: India’s GST faces a hard trade-off, Modi’s election gambit and Odisha’s template for power reforms.
What GST 2.0 Needs
India's seven-year-old Goods and Services Tax faces a bigger problem than how to tax cream buns.
The popular dish was recently used by a Tamil Nadu restauranteur to illustrate, albeit in an exaggerated fashion, the complexity of a multirate GST (one rate on buns, another on cream and a third, much higher one, on cream buns). It cost him an apology to the finance minister, underscoring the rigidity that plagues the tax and its administration.
