NEW DELHI: After the ignominious crash of the IT portal the first time the government attempted to rollout a nationwide eway bill system on February 1 this year, a cleaned up system for inter-state eway bills is likely to be kick-started from April 1. The E-way bill is an electronic document required to track the movement of goods under the new GST regime and is crucial to prevent underreporting and evasion of taxes. However, while trial runs had been operational since January 15, a full nation-wide roll-out attempted on February 1 failed after the portal generating eway bills crashed.
On Saturday, a Group of Ministers (GoM) constituted to look into the readiness of the glitch-ridden tech GST Network recommended a full roll-out of inter-state eway bill system from April 1. The intra-state eway bill system however, will be rolled out in a phased manner after assessing the performance of the former. Speaking to reporters after a meeting for the GoM, chairman Sushil Modi stated that the system which will be rolled out has been upgraded and additional capacity added by the National Informatics Centre to “ensure a successful roll-out”. Two rounds of testing have been concluded and another run is scheduled over the next few days.
The system currently generates 6.5 lakh bills per day under trial. More than 9.5 lakh taxpayers and 8500 transporters are registered on the e-way bill portal.“We anticipate that around 26 lakh to 50 lakh e-way bills will be generated each day and are preparing to generate 75 lakh e-way bills every day,” Modi said.
While the move still has to be ratified by the GST Council, which meets again on March 10, experts say that the decision to roll out the inter-state system first and phase out the intra-state system would help. “This will give time for the government as well as industry to adjust with the new system, and ensure that load on the portal is not sudden,” Pratik Jain, Partner and Leader-Indirect Taxes, PwC India, said.