Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Sunday said that strong public opinion helped in the passage of the Constitution Amendment Bill for the Goods and Services Tax (GST).
"Both two landmark legislations back to back -- the Bankruptcy and GST -- have been passed unanimously and one of the factors why these laws have passed unanimously is that there is a very strong public opinion which has been inflicted upon politicians that we don't want now to go slow and miss this opportunity,” he said at the convocation ceremony of the O P Jindal Global University.
The Constitution Amendment Bill for GST was passed by the Rajya Sabha last week and the government is hopeful to roll out the indirect tax reform from April 1, 2017.
The Finance Minister also noted that an aspirational society has supported reforms and has helped India buck the trend of the global slowdown.
“India is defying that trend. While we are defying that trend, for the first time in history, we are coming out much better than the rest of the world, having missed so many historical opportunities,” he said, while noting that the it was due to conventional thinking that India “missed the bus” with regard to the industrial and technology revolutions.
India grew at 7.4 per cent last fiscal and the government is eyeing 8 per cent growth in 2016-17 on the back of good monsoons. In contrast, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had last month scaled down the global growth forecast for 2017 by 0.1 percentage point to 3.4 per cent and had pegged India’s growth rate at 7.4 per cent in 2016 and 2017.