2019 (10) TMI 874

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....M GST ARA-01 discharging the fee of Rs. 5,000/- each under the CGST Act and the KGST Act. 2. The Applicant is a Company and is registered under the Goods and Services Act, 2017. The applicant has sought advance ruling in respect of the following question: Whether the supply of services in the nature of subscription to the J-Gate by the educational institutions is eligible for exemption from GST under Notification No.2/2018- Central Tax (Rate)? 3. The applicant furnishes some facts relevant to the stated activity: a. The applicant states that they are in the business of supplying online journals. They have a portal called J-Gate, which is a platform for searching various educational journals. Today it qualifies to be the world's larges....

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.... of tax under the GST Act. 4.1 J-Gate can be visualized as a service similar to Tax India Online (TIOL) or GST Law Times: a weekly journal of Goods and Service Tax in print. While TIOL aggregates and indexes case laws, articles, etc. in the area of direct and indirect taxes, J-Gate indexes and aggregates articles from the peer-reveiewd scholarly journals in all discipline sets such as Physical science and Life Sciences, engineering and Technology, Health Sciences, Economics, Laws, Social Sciences, etc. required by higher education institutions. If TIOL and GST Law Times are considered as journals, the applicant feels that J-Gate should also be considered as an online journal. 4.2 The applicant charges the subscribing institutions an annua....

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....ing as well as the additional submissions made by Sri. Dayananda, CA, during the personal hearing. We also considered the issues involved on which advance ruling is sought by the applicant and relevant facts. At the outset, we would like to state that the provisions of both the CGST Act and the KGST Act are the same except for certain provisions. Therefore, unless a mention is specifically made to such dissimilar provisions, a reference to the CGST Act would also mean a reference to the same provisions under the KGST Act. 5.1 The transaction of the applicant is verified and found that the applicant is only providing access to the articles published in various journals and papers to its subscribers. It itself is not publishing any online jo....

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.... the domain of aggregation and supply of educational material which has been published in journals by other persons. 5.3 Further during the hearing the applicant submitted some more facts in writing. One relevant and important information provided by the applicant is as follows: The portal has around 25000 full-fledged journals and metadata of around 25000 journals. Metadata refers to the journals which have the gist of the articles but not the full-fledged information. If a subscriber wants to read the full article, the subscriber has to pay to the publisher and subscribe to the same. However the metadata itself will generally be sufficient for any reader to understand the subject matter. Here it is clear that in respect of the metadat....