India’s goods and services tax collections rose 6% to Rs 1.03 lakh crore in November, reversing two months of decline. GST collections were Rs 97,637 crore in November last year and Rs 95,380 crore in October this year. “After two months of negative growth, GST revenues witnessed an impressive recovery… During the month, the GST collection on domestic transactions witnessed a growth of 12%, highest during the year,” the government said in a statement. “While increase in collections is encouraging, it’s difficult to read too much into the collection for one month, particularly because October was also a month of festivals. We need to see what’s the trend,” said Pratik Jain, a partner at PwC. “The GDP numbers also say that personal consumption expenditure is slightly on the higher side, so from that perspective it was somewhat expected that GST collections would go higher,” said Indranil Pan, chief economist at IDFC First Bank. “This (increase in collections) might be a festive occurrence – whether the intensity with this will go up, only time will say,” Collections may have got a lift from better compliance measures. “With implementation of anti-evasion measures like investigation on identified discrepancies through analytics and the recently implemented restrictions on availing of unmatched credits, there was a general expectation of collections witnessing an increase,” said Abhishek Jain, a tax partner at EY.
