The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) has called a Bharat bandh in India for 26th February 2021 in view of rising fuel prices across the country. Around 40,000 trade associations will be part of this Bharat bandh as per the sources.
The bharat bandh of 26th february will also be targetting at the new GST eway bill and the GST itself. All India Transport Welfare Association (AITWA) is also supporting this cause to get some serious attention from the government.
BC Bhartia (national president) and Praveen Khandelwal (secretary-general) of CAIT in a statement to the media said that Imposed Good and Service Tax (GST) was a complex system that had lead to untold suffering for traders.
BC Bhartia stated that “The current system of GST has become a maze of compliance without tangible benefits to the stakeholders. The trade leaders across the country were of a unanimous view that both central and state governments had failed to respond to the problems of traders regarding the tax”.
He further added that the GST Council had at first proposed several anomalies and distortions in GST which was introduced as ‘One Nation-One Tax’ but also not paying attention to simplify the GST system. “The only aim of the GST Council is to get more revenue and to burden the traders with more compliance without considering the ground realities,”.
Praveen Khandelwal added that In a growing consumer economy like India, businesses (traders) cannot survive without accelerated innovations and variations in the profile of the product according to the changing demands of the market. GST doesn’t have the mechanism to handle product innovations due to its complex tax structure.
They also added in their statement that neither the Center nor the state government had tried to talk with traders regarding GST till now. They further added that “GST should be simplified to the extent that even a small trader operating his business in a remote area could be able to pay the tax without any external help”.
Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com
