NEW DELHI: Uttar Pradesh is home to the largest number of businesses in the country registered for paying Goods and Services Tax (GST), with small businesses accounting for the chunk. This makes the most populous state in the country a hub for small entrepreneurs, show official data.
NEW DELHI: Uttar Pradesh is home to the largest number of businesses in the country registered for paying Goods and Services Tax (GST), with small businesses accounting for the chunk. This makes the most populous state in the country a hub for small entrepreneurs, show official data.
Over 357,000 small businesses in Uttar Pradesh registered for GST payments account for a little less than a fourth of all the small businesses in the country registered in the indirect tax system, showed data available with the finance ministry. Uttar Pradesh has nearly 1.7 million overall GST registrations, more than a quarter of which are compsosition dealers, or businesses that have signed up for a simplified quarterly tax payment scheme without input tax credit.
Industrialised state Maharashtra, which is home to large corporations and collects the highest GST revenue, has about 1.6 million GST registered businesses, of which over 122,000 or over 8% are small businesses. Rajasthan comes next with over 137,000 small GST registered businesses, while Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar have small businesses in the range of 100,000-111,000. About a tenth of the one million GST registrations in Gujarat comprise small businesses.
In terms of GST revenue collection, states with fewer GST registrations but having larger corporations do better. States like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka with fewer overall GST registered businesses compared with Uttar Pradesh, but home to larger businesses collect more GST revenue. Maharashtra reports nearly three times GST revenue receipts that Uttar Pradesh does, on a monthly basis, as per official data. As per the government's thumb rule, 80% of tax revenue in general comes from 20% of tax payers.
Sikkim, Nagaland and Mizoram in the North East, Ladakh and islands Andaman and Nicobar and Lakshadweep have fewer than 10,000 GST registrations, indicating the scanty economic activity taking place in these regions, data showed.
The technology heavy tax system has enabled the government to collect data, especially that relating to intra-state and inter-state transactions, value and number of e-way bills generated in both inbound shipments and out-bound shipments across states and integrated GST on imports into India to see the nature of economic activity taking place in various parts of the country. Regulators are also extensively using data captured in the GST system for compliance enforcement.