Sensex cheers GST, up 300 points after India's biggest tax reform

The BSE Sensex rose nearly 1 per cent on Monday heading for a third straight session of gains. The Sensex zoomed 300.01 points to close at 31,221.62; Nifty gained 94.10 points to 9,615. 

This comes in the backdrop of India on Saturday rolling out its biggest tax reform, replacing more than a dozen Central and state taxes with the GST.

The midnight launch of the GST, the biggest tax reform since independence, catapults India into a select league of nations that have a national sales tax.

Amid boycott of the launch ceremony by principal opposition parties like the Congress which termed it as "tamasha" (gimmick), the new tax regime replaces the messy mix of more than a dozen state and central levies built up over seven decades.

The one national GST unifies the country's $2 trillion economy and 1.3 billion people into a common market, an exercise that took 17 tumultuous years.

The GST will eliminate the compounding effect of the current multi-layered tax system as well as the cross-state tax heterogeneity by fixing the final tax rate.