The passage of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill, officially known as the Constitutional (122nd Amendment) Bill, 2014, in the Rajya Sabha (RS) on Wednesday is being heralded as the most significant tax reform in post-Independence India. After floundering in legislative purgatory for a decade, the country is one step closer to moving towards a simplified tax code owing to 203 RS members voting in favour of the Bill.

The Bill’s passage was cheered by national dailies as well, with the focus being on the central government bringing the opposition and regional parties on board, with the sole exception of Tamil Nadu’s All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK). Thirteen AIADMK MPs staged a walkout before the voting began, claiming that the Bill violated the principle of federalism.

Business Standard, Mint and The Hindu all went with similar headlines, announcing that ‘One nation, one tax’ would soon be a reality, while The Hindustan Times’s front page read: “One India market in sight as Rajya Sabha clears GST bill”. The Indian Express went with a Telegraph-esque pun – ‘G Yes T’ – but the Telegraph itself played it low key and kept the GST news below the fold with the snappy headline, “GST kiss and a quick kick”. The Times of India highlighted the bipartisan spirit of the vote with the headline, “BJP, Cong come together to push biggest reform since ’91” and The Economic Times went with a fairly sombre headline – “Tax reform gets a clean bill”.

Among front page offerings, IE’s blow-by-blow account of RS proceedings leading to the passing of the Bill stands out, as does The Hindu’s report on why the government is keen to implement the new tax regime by April, 2017. The report points out that any delay in execution beyond April 2017 could hurt the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) electoral prospects in the 2019 Lok Sabha (LS) elections as “the first one or two years see a negative impact of higher inflation and a temporary dip in growth”. HT’s front-page flap is also notable since it examines the impact of GST on the telecom and hospitality sectors. An 18 per cent GST rate will bring down restaurant bills, while making phone calls will get dearer, according to HT.

On the inside pages, Harishanker Subramanian’s column in Mint and Dev Chatterjee’s report in BS both tackle an urgent issue that is hardly being talked about amid all the euphoria. Chatterjee’s report says, “98% of Indian companies are not ready with software infrastructure, accounting systems and human resources training for the roll-out of the GST from April 1”. On a similar note, Subramaniam writes that GST necessitates “business transformation” and that the “industry has very limited time to implement the changes”.

However, none of the dailies offered any meaningful criticism of GST, for which one had to turn to new media. Shoaib Danyal’s piece in Scroll laments the fact that under the GST regime, states will lose the power to tax according to their needs leading to “hyper-centralisation”, which ultimately could be “quite disastrous for India’s economy”. The Huffington Post carried an article from Swarajya’s R Jagannathan titled “10 reasons why GST warrants a generous dose of scepticism”, which lists out potential problems GST could face in the future, also calling the media’s reaction to GST “overly rosy, if not plain wrong”.

Economist Madan Sabnavis’s piece in The Wire advises that the celebrations should be delayed until GST is properly implemented and that the “passage of the bill this week will probably be more a success at the political level”.

The media reaction to GST was on the whole predictable – cheerleading for the most part from the mainstream, with a sliver of criticism coming from new media sources.