Introduction

“It was only for the good of his subjects that he collected taxes from them, just as the Sun draws moisture from the Earth to give it back a thousand fold” – Kalidas

The word "Tax" Originates from "Taxation" which means an estimate. In the words of Dalton, tax is defined as “a compulsory contribution imposed by a public authority irrespective of the exact amount of service rendered to the tax payer in return and not imposed as a penalty for any legal offence (Jaiswal, 1). For the taxpayer the meaning of tax is different from its legal interpretation or a financial burden as it contains outflow of cash but for the government, it is an important mechanism of raising revenues in which an element of sacrifice involves without deliberating any direct benefit or return to tax payers.

Tax policies play an important role on countries growth and development. For collecting the taxes from public, taxation structure is made in which laws and rules are formulated by specific individual nation (Ghuge and Katdare, 2016). In taxation system, Complex system limits the growth of country and responsible for hindering the ease of doing business. On the other side, simplified tax system has occasioned in simplifying the comfort of carrying ventures along with development and growth of that specific nation.

India is one of the most rapidly emerging economies in the world. The One Hundred and First Amendment of the Constitution of India, officially known as The Constitution (One Hundred and First Amendment) Act, 2016, presented a national Goods and Services Tax in India from 1 April 2017. It is a simplified and well-structured taxation scheme, where an influential segregation has been done among the state governments’, the central government, and the local bodies.

For analyzing the Indian tax structure’s strength and weaknesses, we compare the Indian tax structure with other BRICS countries tax system (Ghuge, Katdare, 2016). As BRICS is an alliance of five foremost developing national markets: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The BRICS participants are either emerging or recently developed countries, but they are renowned by their huge, rapidly-growing economies and noteworthy effect on local and universal matters (Jaiswal, 2016). Currently BRICS nations signify around 3 billion people, which is about 42% of world’s entire population of around 7.074 billion and hold about 27.3% of combined GDP of the world with China on top (US$ 12,269 billion) followed by India (US$ 4793 billion), Russia (US$ 3373 billion), Brazil (US$ 2365 billion) and South Africa (US$ 586 billion).