TLI Opinion
New Delhi: If disposing a contentious issue with consensus is the main quality of a leader, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman scores very poor on the attribute.
The Goods and Services Tax Council, the all-powerful body under the new indirect tax regime, with Union Finance Minister as its head and states’ finance ministers or their representatives as members on Wednesday resorted to voting on the issue of levying uniform GST rate on lotteries.
This is the first time in the over two years history of GST roll-out that a contentious issue has been resolved by voting. In the past 37 meetings of the Council, all the decisions including the stickiest issues such as jurisdiction of assessees, compensation and tax slabs were decided through consensus with the late BJP veteran Arun Jaitley at helm.
Compared to the issues which were resolved by Jaitley in the run-up to GST launch, the issue of uniform rate on lotteries is much small. It has been learnt that only one or two states especially Kerala insisted for voting. In a nutshell, Sitharaman could not convince even one or two states to continue the noble tradition of making decisions through consensus.
Sitharaman has the distinction of being the first full-time woman Finance Minister but she is also the one who broke the noble tradition of consensus.
Speaking to reporters during the press conference after the GST meet, Sitharaman said that every attempt was made to keep the set tradition live.
“Every attempt was made to convince based on the opinion making in the house. Eventually, the council was reminded that the rules allow and that tradition is not part of the rule book. It was reminded to me that tradition was not part of rule book and the rules is what should govern the running of the house,” she said.
“Therefore, even after that, I had taken the sense of the house and being reminded that even the sense of the house had not warranted and rules had to be complied with that, we went ahead with the decision to go for vote. It was not imposed by the ‘council or me as the chair but it was from the request from one member,” the Finance Minister added.
Later, the GST Council voted for uniform rate of 28 per cent on both state-run and state authorised lottery.
Currently, there are two rates prescribed on the sale of lottery tickets. Lotteries run by state governments are taxed at 12 per cent while those authorised by states and operated by private firms as well as inter-state supplies of lotteries are taxed at peak GST rate of 28 per cent.
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