Over 17 lakh e-way bills generated in 3 days, says official

New Delhi: Over 17 lakh e-way bills for inter-state movement of goods have been generated by businesses and transporters since the launch of the GST anti-evasion measure on April 1, an official said on Wednesday.

The number of e-way bills generated on its platform has been steadily rising with 2.59 lakh bills on April 1, followed by about 6.5 lakh and 8.15 lakh bills in the subsequent two days.

Among states, Gujarat tops the list of e-way bill generation with 3.6 lakh bills generated during April 1-3, followed by Karnataka at 2.65 lakh bills.

Karnataka is the only state which has also launch e-way bill for intra-state movement of goods, along with inter-state.

"Going by the trend, the total number of e-way bills generation is likely to touch 9 lakh today. On a daily basis, we are expecting a 5-10 per cent increase in the generation of bills," an official told PTI.

From April 1, transporters of goods worth over Rs 50,000 have been mandated to generate an e-way bill, which would be required to be presented to a GST inspector, if asked.

This is being touted as an anti-evasion measure and would help boost tax collections by clamping down on trade that currently happens on cash basis.

The GST Council, last month, decided on a staggered roll out of the e-way bill starting with inter-state from April 1 and intra-state from April 15.

The official said a decision on which states should be in the first phase of intra-state roll out would be decided after stabilisation of the current e-way bill system for movement of goods from one state to another.

"We are seeing an uptrend in e-way bill generation. Once the number of such bill generation plateaus, a decision on intra-state launch would be taken," the official added.

Abhishek Jain, Partner at EY, said the e-way bill roll out has been smooth, in line with the government's promise of setting in motion a stabilised system.

"The strategy of the government to introduce inter-state e-way bills in phase 1 and intra-state in later phases has worked out pretty well," Jain said.

The e-way bill provision of the goods and services tax (GST) was first introduced on February 1. However, its implementation was put on hold after the system developed glitches in generating permits.

With several states also starting to generate intra-state e-way bills on the portal, the system developed a snag.

Since then, the platform has been made more robust so that it can handle as many as 75 lakh inter-state e-way bills daily without any glitch.

"Second innings of e-way bills is having a smooth run, and overall response from trade and industry is encouraging. In the last couple of days, not even a single grievance has come in on the technology front," AMRG & Associates Partner, Rajat Mohan, said.

Data retrieved from e-way bills would also support the government build analytics around tax collections on a real-time basis, Mohan added.

The implementation of the nationwide e-way bill mechanism under GST regime is being done by GST Network in association with the National Informatics Centre (NIC).