GSTN Achievements: Complex Made Easy
A suave technocrat Kumar with previous stints as IT Secretary as well as working with private MNCs like Microsoft and Cisco, Kumar is quick to highlight the achievements of GSTN too. “The portal receives around 40 to 45 crore business invoices every month. And 15 -20 calls every day and then we get 3000 self service complaints per day which is taken care of by Tech Mahindra. During the development phase STQC did a brilliant job. The entire procurement process is of the government. We have been audited by CAG and we are under the RTI Act.” Prakash highlights the other achievements too - The datacentre we have today is designed keeping in view 1.3 crore tax payers. But government told us that there will 65 lakhs tax payers but somehow we had this feeling that once GST will come which will bring the simplicity, uniform system there will be the more no. of tax payers then expected. So our initial design was more than two times itself. And without changing any software we have to to double of that. That’s the kind of design we have made which we called scalable design. We have our main data centre in Delhi. And Data recovery centre is in Bangalore. But we also have a concept of near DC and near DR; we have two in Delhi and two in Bangalore. Near DC doesn’t have any compute, it only has storage. So whatever you store in main data centre that also gets replicated in near DC. This is to ensure the zero data loss.” Today 28% of invoices are getting uploaded through GSPs but it’s also a fact that all GSPs are not active. Some of them are really good and they are doing very good business and very good no. of returns is coming from them. So that there is enough competition. In filing GST Punjab is on the top but the states of north east they are really in a bad situation till date. But the maximum filing happens after due date. Only 62% files fi by due date. “Our main function functio is to design the architecture and data and the partner. Now once the partner is in place we have to interpret the business busi rules which is as per law and the rules and convert it into SRS. Then whatever is developed based on SRS they also approve it. That’s why we have 2 sets of people - one in tax department and the other who are taking tak care of the technology part. W We also have another team who looks after aft infrastructure part, data centre and the t network. Of course data centre is run by Infosys. But the overall management lies with us. So we are the face to the government.” Kumar also informs that GSTN is prepared for the rollout of the GST e-way bill the second time around “We have made a lot of changes. NIC (National Informatics Centre) has upgraded the infrastructure. We have tested the system for the number of e-way bills that can be generated. We have prepared the system for 75 lakh e-way bills daily as against 26 lakh before. We have also decided to first start with inter-state e-way bills from 1 April and then move to intra-state later. You cannot estimate intra-state volumes. So that is why we have sought a staggered rollout for intra-state bringing in only 4-5 states in one go.”