THE GOODS AND SERVICES TAX: AN EMBODIMENT OF CO-OPERATIVE FEDERALISM IN INDIA
Downloads
Abstract
India witnessed a significant fiscal reform on July 1 2017 when The Goods and Services Tax (hereinafter GST) came out. GST being a consumption-based tax is being heralded as an emissary of a more efficient and productive scheme of taxation. GST has subsumed a large number of central and state taxes into a single tax which will help mitigate ill effects of cascading or double taxation in a major way; thereby developing a common national market. Passing of GST has taken India one step closer to realising the ambition of one economic India with ‘One Market’. GST is exemplary as to how the states and Centre have ceded their power to tax, resulting in creation of a quintessential taxation model.
Till now, fiscal powers between Centre and the States were clearly defined in the Constitution with almost no overlap between the respective domains. With the enforcement of GST arose the need for complementary amendments in the Constitution to underline the power of Centre and States to impose and collect GST concurrently. India follows a quasi-federal structure of governance which reconciles multiplicity, centralisation with decentralisation and nationalism with localism thus resulting in what is called co-operative federalism. With co-operative federalism being the fountainhead of Indian democracy, it becomes imperative to analyse the interplay of GST with co-operative federalism.
External References to this Article
Loading reference data...
License Terms
Ownership and Licensing:
Authors of research papers submitted to any journal published by The Law Brigade Publishers retain the copyright of their work while granting the journal specific rights. Authors maintain ownership of the copyright and grant the journal the right of first publication. Simultaneously, authors agree to license their research papers under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) License.
License Permissions:
Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 License, others are permitted to share and adapt the work, even for commercial purposes, provided that appropriate attribution is given to the authors, and acknowledgment is made of the initial publication by The Law Brigade Publishers. This license encourages the broad dissemination and reuse of research papers while ensuring that the original work is properly credited.
Additional Distribution Arrangements:
Authors are free to enter into separate, non-exclusive contractual arrangements for distributing the published version of the work (e.g., posting it to institutional repositories or publishing it in books), provided that the original publication by The Law Brigade Publishers is acknowledged.
Online Posting:
Authors are encouraged to share their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on personal websites) both prior to submission and after publication. This practice can facilitate productive exchanges and increase the visibility and citation of the work.
Responsibility and Liability:
Authors are responsible for ensuring that their submitted research papers do not infringe on the copyright, privacy, or other rights of third parties. The Law Brigade Publishers disclaims any liability for any copyright infringement or violation of third-party rights within the submitted research papers.
Published
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Copyright © 2026 by Suyash Bhamore
The copyright and license terms mentioned on this page take precedence over any other license terms mentioned on the article full text PDF or any other material associated with the article.
