Traders protest, govt says GST-ready

Chandigarh : Even as the Punjab Government claims that it is ready to migrate to GST from July 1, traders across the state are up in arms against the move. With businesses facing a slowdown, they fear that the migration to the new tax regime would increase their input costs and further shrink profit margins. Badish Jindal, president of the Federation of Punjab Small Industries Association, told The Tribune that in states such as Punjab, where 90 per cent of the economy was in the informal sector, working on low profit margins, traders could not afford to hire professionals to deal with GST. He expressed the apprehension that many dealers/businesses could shut down. Excise and Taxation Commissioner Vivek Pratap Singh said of the 2.41 lakh dealers in the state, 2.05 lakh had already logged in their billing systems to the new tax regime. “Only about 36,000 traders/dealers are left and we are trying to remove the hurdles faced by them. It’s likely that some of these dealers could surrender their numbers and many would get out of the tax net as the exemption limit under GST has been raised to an annual sales turnover of Rs 20 lakh, as compared to a bar of Rs 5 lakh sales in the case of VAT.” He added: “Punjab is among the top five GST-ready states in the country. With the passing of the GST Act in the Vidhan Sabha, we have repealed the Punjab VAT Act, except in the case of petroleum products and liquor. Purchase tax, infrastructure development fee and VAT collected for local bodies will be subsumed, while entertainment tax and luxury tax will also go with the GST rollout.”