The GST Council, headed by the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, will meet today 3 January,
with the representatives of six crucial sectors, including banking, IT, telecom and insurance to assess the implementation bottlenecks under the new GST regime. The Council will also be to solve the contentious issue of dual control, besides budget consultations with state finance ministers. Dual control is basically about the control between the Centre and the states on VAT, excise duty and service tax after the rollout of the proposed indirect tax regime.

State GST draft law needs to be endorsed by state legislatures while the CGST draft law
needs to be approved by Parliament. Compensation law has to be approved by Parliament. The GST Compensation Bill will offer a legal backing to the Centre's harmony to compensate the states to the full extent of 100 percent if their revenue growth rate falls below 14 percent in the first five years of GST rollout. 

Luxury items and demerit goods would be taxed at the highest rate and would further attract a tax to generate a Rs 50,000 crore corpus for compensating states for loss of
revenue.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitely is hopeful that GST will be implemented from 1st of April
this year. Introduction GST is considered a very important step in the field of indirect tax
reforms in India. This will be the 8th meeting of the council since the council met for the
first time on September 22, 2016.