The reform process of India's indirect tax regime was started in 1986 by Vishwanath Pratap Singh with the introduction of the Modified Value Added Tax (MODVAT).[8] A single common "Goods and Services tax (GST)" was proposed and given a go-ahead in 1999 during a meeting between then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his economic advisory panel, which included three former RBI governors IG Patel, Bimal Jalan and C Rangarajan. Vajpayee set up a committee headed by the then finance minister of West Bengal, Asim Dasgupta to design a GST model.
The Ravi Dasgupta committee was also tasked with putting in place the backend technology and logistics (later came to be known as GSTN in 2017) for rolling out a uniform taxation regime in the country. In 2003, the Vajpayee government formed a task force under Vijay Kelkar to recommend tax reforms. In 2005, the Kelkar committee recommended rolling out GST as suggested by the 12th Finance Commission.
After the fall of the BJP led NDA government in 2004, and the election of a Congress led UPA government, the new Finance Minister P Chidambaram in February 2006 continued work on the same and proposed a GST rollout by 1 April 2010. However in 2010, with the Trinamool Congress routing CPI(M) out of power in West Bengal, Asim Dasgupta resigned as the head of the GST committee. Dasgupta admitted in an interview that 80% of the task had been done.
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