Ajay Bhushan Pandey, who is the CEO of Unique Identification Authority of India, popularly known as Aadhaar has been given additional responsibility as the chairman of the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN). Mr. Navin Kumar who was the chairman of GSTN earlier had retired in August earlier.

Navin Kumar is a former IAS officer from Bihar who was the first chairman to be appointed for GSTN on May 17, 2013. On the completion of his term, his tenure in the office was extended with the condition that he would remain in the office till he turned 65 years old.

India under Modi rolled out its most ambitious project of a unified tax system on 1st July 2017 this year where GSTN played a major backbone for the new tax reform. Mr. Pandey has been with UIDAI, which is handling the Aadhaar project as well. The Aadhaar project was launched nearly seven years ago.

Mr. Pandey is an IAS (Indian Administrative Services) officer, who previously graduated from IIT Kanpur and then obtained an MS followed by a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Minnesota.

Goods and Service Tax Network is a non-profit entity incorporated on March 2013 that is owned by the Centre, states as well as non-government financial institutions. It comes under section 8 of the Companies Act 2013, which states that it is a non-government, private limited company. It is responsible for building and running the GST, which is the new tax reform implemented in India. GSTN is popularly known as the backbone of the goods and services tax as it looks after the entire

GSTN is popularly known as the backbone of the goods and services tax as it looks after the entire technical support and registrations. It has been used as the portal for the real-time taxpayers’ registrations, migrations and tax return filings.

The government of India has a holding of about 24.5% equity in GSTN. The remaining 24.5% equity is held by all the states of the Indian Union, including NCT of the national capital Delhi and Puducherry (both hold an equal equity stake). The balance 51% is with the non-government financial institutions.The government confirmed the news via a notification as the Department Of Revenue issued an order under the Ministry Of Finance.