The ruling NDA needs Congress support to pass the GST Bill in the Rajya Sabha as it does not have a majority in the Upper House.
The ruling NDA needs Congress support to pass the GST Bill in the Rajya Sabha as it does not have a majority in the Upper House. Once the bill is approved by the Rajya Sabha, it has to be approved by half of the 29 states before it can go into force.
Finance minister Arun Jaitley said: “In the Lok Sabha, the Congress walked out, (but) every other party voted in favour. The Congress has now made a statement that it has only one issue about the constitutional cap, which is a little difficult as our tariff is not decided through a Constitution amendment,” he said. The Congress, incidentally, is the original author of this landmark tax reform measure. Mr Jaitley, explaining the rationale, said this demand was extremely difficult to accept as every time an increase in tha tariff was needed, the Constitution would have to be amended. The tariff, he said, must be decided by the GST Council and not through a constitutional cap. “It seems to be the only glitch. I would still want the Congress Party to come on board. I can easily see and this is going to happen at this stage of the biennial election. The numbers are significantly changing, and in any case I am reasonably confident that the numbers in the Upper House now also are in favour of GST,” he said.
The constitutional amendment to GST seeks to replace a slew of Central and state levies, transforming the nation of 1.3 billion people into a customs union. The bill is backed by all parties in the Rajya Sabha, barring the Congress (67 MPs) and AIADMK (12). The Congress is opposed to the current “flawed” version and wants the GST rate to be capped at 18 per cent, a proposed state levy scrapped and an independent mechanism to resolve disputes on revenue sharing between states. The government has the backing of 155 members in the 242-member Rajya Sabha, that is short of the two-thirds (162 votes) needed to approve a Constitution Amendment Bill.
