 from the makers of demonetization. 500 and 1000 and more comes a mega policy that pledges to change the economic landscape of India forever. GST For those of you who do not understand the GST well, neither do we. The GST is supposed to be a revolutionary transformation of India's tax system. The GST is supposed to do many good things. Eliminate tax evasion, reduce the cost of tax collection, bring foreign investment, unify the nation, eliminate terrorism from Pakistan and save all cows of the motherland. Okay, maybe not the last two. Prime Minister Modi thinks it to be so revolutionary that in a recent trip to the United States he suggested the Americans should learn a thing or two from GST. So for those of you who are still wondering what on earth is GST? Goods and services tax once implemented will replace almost all the indirect taxes that central and state government levy on goods and services. Till now, under India's federal structure state governments had the right to determine the tax rate they levy on different commodities. For example, cars cost more in Haryana than in Delhi. This gave different states the flexibility to tax goods based on their needs. So a poor state may decide to levy higher taxes than its states on luxury goods to help pay for education or, say, health care. Kerala, for example, charges luxury taxes on cars priced higher than 20 lakhs and on apartments bigger than 2,000 square feet. Great, right? Nope. There would be a GST council that would decide on the tax rates. Now the GST council would consist of all the state government representatives plus the central government representatives. So suppose I happen to be in a particular state government and I want the tax rate to be changed. In that case, I would have to approach the GST council where I am only one of the members. As a result, my autonomy in fixing the tax rate that I believe is essential for raising greater revenues in the states is something that completely goes. States will effectively become the tax collectors of the centre. Much like commission agents, they will receive a cut. The government argues that tax collection will become easier and corruption in the process will decline. But if the same old institutions are implementing new policies, change is far from certain. Old wine in a new bottle anyone? One of the arguments is that GST will unify the market in India, making it one nation, one market. Now I just want to bring to your notice the fact that the most powerful capitalist country in the world is the United States which is the leader of world capitalism and the US not only does not have a uniform GST across the states, different states have different exemption limits, different states charge different taxes, it has a plethora of taxes. Now who is going to tell me that the US does not have a uniform national market? Fun fact, did you know that back in 2011 it was the congress government that pushed hard for the GST in parliament? But the bill was repeatedly stalled by guess who? The BJP. Now let's come to the GSTN, the back end of the GST. The GSTN is a special purpose company established to provide IT support to implement GST. It will also serve as a repository for all GST related data. But the majority stake in GSTN is you guessed it right, privately held. Central and states each hold 24.5% in GSTN. LIC housing finance holds 11% while HDFC, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and NSE strategic investment company hold 10% each. And if things couldn't get murkier, Naveen Kumar, the head of GST network has said that software testing for the implementation of GST is not fully done and cannot be accomplished by the July 1st deadline. In fact, the GST server went down on the night of June 30th one day before its launch because there were too many users logged in. So if the software is not ready, why is the government bulldozing the entire country into the GST? Can India, reeling with farmer suicides and unemployment, afford another poorly thought out economic policy at this time? Let's find out.