India’s GST collection rose on both sequential and year-on-year basis in November.
The gross GST collection rose to Rs 1,31,526 crore last month, and it was the second straight month when the gross GST collection crossed Rs 1.30 lakh crore.
Besides, the GST revenue for November 2021 was 25 per cent higher than the corresponding period of last year and 27 per cent over the like month of 2019-20.
As per the Ministry of Finance, out of the total gross collection, CGST’s share was Rs 23,978 crore, SGST was Rs 31,127 crore, IGST about Rs 66,815 crore and cess was Rs 9,606 crore.
“The GST revenues for November 2021 have been the second highest ever since the introduction of GST, second only to that in April 2021, which related to year-end revenues and higher than last month’s collection, which also included the impact of returns required to be filed quarterly,” the ministry said.
“This is very much in line with the trend in economic recovery.”
It also said that the recent trend of high GST revenues has been a result of various policy and administrative measures that have been taken in the past to improve compliance.
“Central tax enforcement agencies, along with the state counterparts have detected large tax evasion cases, mainly cases relating to fake invoices, with the help of various IT tools developed by ‘GSTN’ that use the return, invoice and ‘e-way bill’ data to find suspicious taxpayers.
“A large number of initiatives undertaken in the last one year like, enhancement of system capacity, nudging non-filers after last date of filing of returns, auto-population of returns, blocking of ‘e-way bills’ and passing of input tax credit for non-filers has led to consistent improvement in the filing of returns over the last few months.”
ICRA Chief Economist, Aditi Nayar, said: “The November 2021 GST collections are somewhat lower than what we had expected, even as the pace of YoY expansion is robust.
“We were hopeful that the GST collections in November 2021 would exceed the prevailing highest collections recorded in April 2021, given the all-time high generation of e-way bills during October 2021.”
Looking ahead, Nayar said collections may dip in December 2021, as suggested by the deceleration in the daily average ‘e-way bill’ generation in the first three weeks of November 2021.
“Nevertheless, we expect CGST collections to rise to Rs 5.8 trillion in FY2022, exceeding the FY2022 BE by Rs 500 billion.”
