A DECADE INTO THE UNDERSTANDING AND CHANGES TO THE INDIAN GST ACT

This paper examines the Indian Goods and Services Tax regime roughly nine years after its introduction on 1 July 2017, treating the period as functionally a decade for purposes of legal assessment. It traces the constitutional architecture inserted by the 101st Amendment, the statutory framework of the Central, Integrated, and Union Territory GST Acts, and the amendments that have reshaped input tax credit and rate structure since enactment. It then surveys the decade’s most consequential judicial interventions - on the bindingness of GST Council recommendations, refund formulae under the inverted duty structure, return rectification, provisional attachment, secondment arrangements, and credit on immovable property - before turning to the long-delayed GST Appellate Tribunal and the September 2025 rate rationalisation exercise. The paper argues that, notwithstanding genuine gains in market integration and the elimination of cascading taxation, the law remains doctrinally unsettled: amended frequently, interpreted inconsistently for much of the decade, and on one notable occasion, legislatively reversed within months of a taxpayer-favourable ruling.