India reports record high tax collection for April

NEW DELHI, May 1 (Xinhua) -- A record amount of 103,458 crore Indian Rupees (about 15.5 billion U.S. dollars) was collected in India in the form of goods and services tax (GST) during April 2018, according to official data released by the country's Ministry of Finance on Tuesday.

This is the first time when GST collection has crossed the one trillion Indian Rupees mark.

Out of this, 18,652 crore Indian Rupees (2.8 billion U.S. dollars) were Central GST (or CGST), 25,704 crore Indian Rupees (3.86 billion U.S. dollars) were States GST (or SGST), and 50,548 crore Indian Rupees were collected (7.6 billion U.S. dollars) as Integrated GST (IGST).

While CGST goes to the account of central government, SGST goes to respective states' account and IGST is charged when movement of goods and services from one state to another occurs.

The Modi government introduced the GST regime in July 2017 as a major tax reform with the objective of widening the tax net and thereby increasing total tax collections.

The increase in tax collections could be attributed to the economic recovery and improvement in compliances. However, the ministry's statement cautioned that the higher numbers could be partly attributed to the payment of tax arrears in the month for the last financial year.

"It is usually noticed that in the last month of the Financial Year (i.e. March), people also tried to pay arrears of some of the previous months, and therefore, this month's revenue cannot be taken as a trend for the future," added the official statement. Enditem