GST to widen tax net, make India Inc more competitive: CII

New Delhi: The GST rollout will impart major competitiveness to Indian industry, incentivise exports and help expand the tax net, CII said.

The implementation of the crucial tax reform gives tremendous confidence to the industry that the government will continue to facilitate investments and simplify the business environment, the industry body said.

"We have emerged...into a new era of economic reform with the introduction of the game-changing GST. This will stand as an exemplar of collaborative reform for the world on an unprecedented scale," CII President Shobana Kamineni said.

The CII President said that going forward, GST will contribute to ease of doing business and accelerate new business ventures. She said that GST is based on self-compliance with the input tax credit as a powerful incentive to businesses to step into the tax fold.

"Input tax credit will curb inflation by avoiding tax- on-tax. We believe that most businesses would pass on the benefits of input tax credit to consumers so that inflation would be curbed," said Kamineni, adding that the industry is prepared for implementing the Goods and Services Tax (GST).

Besides, Assocham said that with retail prices growing by the slowest pace in the last four years, the timing for the GST was perfect from the inflation point of view. The chamber said that while the GST may face some initial hiccups, the broad and the most important macro matrix is perfectly placed.

"In the backdrop of subdued consumer demand, there is no reason for the industry not to pass on any benefit accruing from the GST. The top priority for the industry today is to step up its capacity utilisation by increasing production, helped by consumer demand," Assocham said.