E-way bill and e-invoice is driven from the city by a small team from National Informatics Centre
As the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime is set to complete five years in a few days, Bengaluru has contributed to its nationwide operation. The backend operations for the crucial e-way bill, mandatory to move goods across the country, and the e-invoice that helps in input credit, is driven from the city by a small team from the National Informatics Centre (NIC).
In the four years since its inception, the country has seen over 273 crore e-way bills being generated to move goods and over 163 crore e-invoices having been generated. While the transition from the Value Added Tax (VAT) regime to GST regime took place on July 1, 2017, the e-way bill was introduced on April 1, 2018, while the e-invoice was introduced in October 2020. In fact, the e-Sugam launched by the Karnataka Commercial Tax in 2010 morphed into the e-way bill under the nation-wide GST regime. In the VAT regime, Karnataka was generating 1.2 lakh e-way bills a day.
36% increase
Since its introduction in 2018 April, the number of e-way bills generated daily has seen a 36% increase from about 22 lakh a day to 30 lakh a day. If 55.8 crore e-way bills were generated in 2018-2019, it has shot up to 77.4 crore in 2021-2022.
In case of e-invoice, the numbers have shot up by 92% since October 2020 when 26 lakh invoices were generated daily to about 50 lakh invoices daily now. If 4.95 crore e-invoices were generated in October 2020, it has reached 12.18 crore in April 2022. The numbers have also increased as the e-invoice mandate has been extended to those reporting above ₹500 crore turnover annually when the e-invoice was introduced in October 2020 to include those reporting turnover of over ₹20 crore in April 2022.
The NIC, sources in Commercial Tax Department said, has been managing the entire operations from Bengaluru with a staff of around 50. Sources also said, “It is heartening that the 24/7 software and hardware support from Bengaluru has been such that there has been no incident of the software glitch where an e-way bill generation has been delayed over the past four years.”
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