New Delhi, Aug. 17 -- While delivering his Independence Day address on 15 August, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the long-overdue goods and service tax (GST) reforms. He promised a "double Diwali' this year, indicating that a reformed GST system with lower rates for consumers would be in place before the festival of lights.

Mint looks at the proposal, its implications and whether GST 2.0 will correct all the shortcomings of the earlier version.

The idea of GST was first proposed in the year 2000 by the Kelkar Task Force on Indirect taxes. It took 17 long years for it to become a reality and was rolled out on 1 July 2017. By subsuming a wide variety of taxes such as excise duty, value-added tax and service tax, it created a unifo...