When Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Goods and Services Tax at midnight in July 2017, he hailed it as a “Good and Simple Tax”, a reform to sweep away India’s patchwork of state levies and create a unified market.

Eight years later, India’s GST had evolved into one of the world’s most complicated indirect tax regimes. Five separate slabs, layered with cesses and exemptions, left firms struggling to interpret rules. Small businesses—the very group the GST was meant to help—found themselves mired in paperwork, filing multiple returns, and grappling with endless disputes over classification. It is this disillusionment the government now seeks to fix by collapsing multiple rates.

From Diwali this October, if the timetable holds, five separate........

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