NEW DELHI: GST collection in March touched an all-time high of over Rs 1.42 trillion, an increase of 15% annually, on the back of rate rationalisation and anti-evasion steps, the finance ministry said on Friday.
With the record collection, the Centre’s Goods and Services Tax (GST) mop-up has exceeded the revised budget target of Rs 5.7 trillion set for the previous fiscal ended March 31, 2022.
The gross GST revenue collected in March 2022 is Rs 1.42 trillion, of which CGST is Rs 25,830 crore, SGST is Rs 32,378 crore, IGST is Rs 74,470 crore (including Rs 39,131 crore collected on import of goods) and cess is Rs 9,417 crore (including Rs 981 crore collected on import of goods).
The gross GST collection in March 2022 is all-time high, breaching an earlier record of nearly Rs 1.41 trillion collected in January.
The government has settled Rs 29,816 crore to CGST and Rs 25,032 crore to SGST from IGST as regular settlement. In addition, Centre has also settled Rs 20,000 crore of IGST on ad-hoc basis in the ratio of 50:50 between Centre and states/UTs in March. The total revenue of Centre and the states in the month of March 2022 after regular and ad-hoc settlements is Rs 65,646 crore for CGST and Rs 67,410 crore for the SGST. Centre also released GST compensation of Rs 18,252 crore to states/UTs during the month.
The revenues for the month of March 2022 are 15% higher than the GST revenues in the same month last year and 46% higher than the GST revenues in March 2020. During the month, revenues from import of goods was 25% higher and the revenues from domestic transaction (including import of services) are 11% higher than the revenues from these sources during the same month last year.
Total number of e-way bills generated in the month of February 2022 is 69.1 million as compared to e-way bills generated in the month of January 2022 (68.8 million) despite being a shorter month, which indicates recovery of business activityat faster pace, said the ministry in a statement.
The average monthly gross GST collection for the last quarter of the FY22 has been Rs 1.38 trillion as against the average monthly collection of Rs 1.1 trillion, Rs 1.15 trillion and Rs 1.3 trillion in the first, second and third quarters, respectively.
“The improvement in revenue has also been due to various rate rationalisation measures undertaken by the Council to correct inverted duty structure,” the ministry said in a statement.
Deloitte India Partner M S Mani said the record GST collections have also been aided by the strong sales activity of corporates in March, as they raced to close the fiscal with high topline growth. This had a direct bearing on GST, which is a transaction tax.
“While state-wise variations exist in terms of the growth in GST collections, it would be interesting to see an analysis linking the state-wise GDP growth with the GST collections during the same period,” Mani said.
NA Shah Associates Partner Parag Mehta said with further reduction in e-invoicing limits to Rs 20 crore from Rs 50 crore, there is bound to be substantial increase even in subsequent months.
“Further in the month of March normally there is also a exercise being conducted by trade to regularise the mistakes etc and deposit the taxes which leads to higher recovery,” Mehta added.
—PTI

Press Trust of India