Guess The IT Firm That's Handling GST Rollout. Hint: It's Not Microsoft.

The Goods and Services Tax or GST on Wednesday cleared its first big hurdle, with Rajya Sabha passing the tax reform bill in a session that ended late in the night.

The GST bill, hailed as India's biggest tax reform since independence, will now have to be approved by the Lok Sabha and at least 50 per cent of the state assemblies to become a law.

But legislative challenges apart, a lot of administrative work needs to be done to enable the rollout of GST in eight months from now, experts say.

One key element crucial to the GST rollout is a modern and effective IT infrastructure. The government had last year awarded the contract to build and maintain the technology network for GST to Infosys.

India's second largest IT outsourcer pipped peers such as TCS and Wipro and global giant Microsoft to win the five-year Rs 1,380 crore GST contract.

Infosys will work closely with a company called GST Network, which was formed to provide the technology backbone to introduce GST and connect the databases of states and the Centre.

Morgan Stanley in a report said that the network to roll out GST is built for uploading about three billion business-to-business (B2B) invoices every month across the country.

"As per the revenue department of the government, the roll-out of the network could take five to six months," the investment bank added.

The government has set April 2017 deadline to implement the GST. Analysts say the target is challenging, but they added that GST can be implemented at any time during the financial year and does not necessarily have to be at the start of the year.

The Goods and Services Tax will replace a number of confusing and overlapping central and state levies to create a common market across India for the first time.