Over 170,000 e-way bills generated on launch day; real load test on Monday

Over 171,000 inter-state e-way bill have been generated on the day of nationwide launch today, with experts saying that the real test of the portal will be tomorrow.

Beginning today, businesses and transporters have to produce before a GST inspector e-way bill for moving goods worth over Rs 50,000 from one state to another.

A total of 10,96,905 taxpayers have registered on e-way bill portal till date. Further 19,796 transporters, who are not registered under GST, have enrolled themselves on the e-way bill portal, the finance ministry said in a statement.

"1,71,503 e-way bills have been successfully generated on the portal from 00:00 hours till 17:00 hrs of 1st April, 2018," the ministry said.

Official at the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN), the company which has developed the IT backbone for GST regime, said that the e-way bill platform been working smoothly and Karnataka is also generating e-way bill for intra-state movement of goods.

The implementation of the nationwide e-way bill mechanism under GST regime is being done by GSTN in association with the National Informatics Centre (NIC) and is being run on portal -- https://ewaybillgst.gov.in.

Karnataka is the only state, which has implemented the e-way bill system for moving goods within the state. The state has been using the e-way bill platform since September last year for intra-state movement of goods.

Experts, however, said that the real test of load capacity of the portal will be tested tomorrow as the number of e-way bills generated on Sunday is much less compared to weekdays.

"No major hiccups on the first day of the relaunch of the inter-state e-way bill system. The e-way bill portal seems to be much stable this time. However, it would be important to watch how the portal functions for few more days to be absolutely sure," EY Partner Abhishek Jain said.

Touted as an anti-evasion measure and will help boost tax collections by clamping down on trade that currently happens on cash basis, the e-way bill provision of the goods and services tax (GST) was first introduced on February 1.

However, its implementation was put on hold after the system developed glitches in generating permits. The system developed a snag when several states also started generating intra-state e-way bills on the portal.

Since then, the platform has been made more robust so that it can handle load of as many as 7.5 million inter-state e-way bills daily without any glitch.

As many 10.5 million businesses have registered under the GST and about 7 million filing monthly returns.

The GST Council, last month, had decided on a staggered rollout of the e-way bill starting with inter-state from April 1 and intra-state from April 15.