The Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) has been consistently making progress, with a steady rise in the number of taxpayers in the country, according to a report released by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM). The GST system, which was rolled out back in July 2017, had 38 lakh taxpayers at the beginning and that number rose to 1.37 crore by June 2018, with a peak of about 1.42 crore in the last quarter of 2022.
Along with the increasing number of taxpayers, the performance of the GSTN system has also improved steadily over time, leading to a decline in complaints from 2.36 lakh (in early 2018) to 17,000 in the last quarter of 2022. The paper also mentions that the time taken to resolve taxpayer issues reached a satisfactory rate of 22-24 hours at the call centre.
The report also highlighted other key improvements that the GSTN has been making, such as its chatbot, GITA, that has been helping taxpayers with their queries. The technology incorporated with the chatbot includes natural language processing, natural language understanding, natural language generation, and dialogue management. These improvements have been instrumental in increasing the on-time filing rate of returns to a steady 76 per cent.
The report also suggested that GITA should be given capabilities like ChatGPT through deep learning enabled with advanced-generative based conversational AI which uses no predefined repository of responses. The authors of the report, Paraj Dikshit and Sanjeev Sanyal, concluded that while the performance of the GSTN system has improved steadily over time there are still some elements of improvement that can still be made in terms of filing accuracy and responsiveness to queries.
The Econmic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) is an apex think-tank that provides evidence-based policy-oriented advice for optimising socio-economic development in India. It is chaired by Dr. Bibek Debroy, a prominent Indian economist and a professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. The council was established under the aegis of the National Institution for Transforming India in September 2017.
