New Delhi: The first meeting of the newly-constituted Goods and Services Tax Council, with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley as chairman, is scheduled for two days from Thursday amid high expectations that the country will see a new indirect tax scheme in place from April 1, 2017, as targeted.

Among the items on the meeting's agenda is the election of a vice chairman of the council -- likely to be one of the members of the Empowered Committee of State Finance Ministers, officials said. Other items on the agenda include deliberations on the actual GST base rate, the various slabs, the items that need to be subsumed into and exempted from the new regime, and draft Central, State and Integrated GST laws.