The collections have been 65% higher than the GST revenues in the same month, despite many states being under lockdown due to the Covid pandemic, the finance ministry said Saturday.
Gross GST revenue collected in May of this year was higher than Rs 1 lakh crore for the eighth month in a row, according to data released by the government.
Read more about GST revenue shortfall: Centre may have to borrow Rs 1.58 trillion on Business Standard. Shortfall estimated at Rs 2.7 trn; Rs 1.1 trn may be met via cess collection
Transfer some forex reserves to states for covid expenses
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Vivek Moorthy
A grant of $200 per person to each state will help them spend on vaccines and other urgent medical needs
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Very recently, I wrote, “Within India, as for taxes, if states were allotted some reserves, many more people would have been vaccinated by now. (‘Of poor nations rich enough to have imported vaccines’, 11 May, Mint). Building on that conjecture, this follow-up article makes a concrete suggestion.
As the covid death toll mounted fiercely, there has been a tectonic shift in policy. Since mid-April, India has dismantled its vaccine licence raj, just as it dismantled the sprawling socialist licence raj starting 1991. Finding it impossible to manage the purchase and allocation of vaccines, the Centre has told states to ‘do it yourself’. At the time this was written, about 10 states had floated global tenders for importing vaccines.
He is the second State Minister in last 10 days to raise issue
There is an urgent need to call a meeting of the GST Council, especially with the brutal second wave that is likely to severely hit the economy, West Bengal Finance Minister Amit Mitra said in a letter to Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday. The council has not met since the virtual meeting it held in October last year.
Mr. Mitra is the second State Finance Minister to raise the issue in the 10 ten days. In a letter to Ms. Sitharaman, Punjab Finance Minister Manpreet Singh Badal made a similar demand on May 5.