Roots of GST were planted back in 2000 when the Vajpayee government constituted a committee which was headed by Asim Kumar Dasgupta (finance minister of West Bengal. The committee was constituted with an objective to monitor
the implementation of uniform floor rates of sales tax by States and Union Territories, to monitor the phasing out of the sales-tax based incentive schemes, to decide milestones and methods of States to switch over to VAT and to monitor reforms in the Central Sales Tax system existing in the country.