“Government has settled Rs. 17,490 crore to CGST and Rs. 15,107 crore to SGST from IGST as regular settlement. Further, Rs 30,000 crore has been settled from the balance IGST available with the Centre on provisional basis in the ratio of 50:50 between Centre and States,” the statement added.
The total revenue earned by both Central Government and the State Governments after regular and provisional settlement in the month of October, 2018 was Rs 48,954 crore for CGST and Rs 52,934crore for the SGST. The states which achieved extra- ordinary growth in total taxes collected from the state assesses include Kerala – 44 per cent, Jharkhand – 20 per cent, Rajasthan – 14 per cent, Uttarakhand – 13 per cent and Maharashtra – 11 per cent.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley attributed the rise in the tax mop-up in October to lower tax rates and higher compliance."GST collections for October 2018 have crossed Rs 1 lakh crore. The success of GST is lower rates, lesser evasion, higher compliance, only one tax and negligible interference by taxation authorities,” Jaitley tweeted.
This splurge in revenue collection will further provide a respite to the government which is running behind on meeting its fiscal deficit target of 3.3 per cent of gross domestic product. However, it will challenging for the government to maintain the upward trend in GST revenue collection in the second half of the fiscal as this is only how it can make up for the shortcoming of the first half collections.