The Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) Portal now successfully handles almost double the taxpayer traffic for return filing immediately after lockdown. This has been made possible as GST infra has been upgraded to handle up to 3 lakh concurrent logged-in users at a time.
GSTN augmented the capacity of the gateway from 1.5 lakh to 3 lakh concurrent logged-in taxpayers in June 2020 as a proactive measure to handle the expected sharp surge in indirect tax-related activities on the portal after easing of lockdown. Further, the upgrade has enabled GSTN to handle and scale up to 5 lakhs concurrently logged-in taxpayers, if necessary.
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Thereby, the GST eco-system is future-ready to offer a seamless experience to taxpayers with its augmented capacity even beyond the current load limits.
Taking the surge during peak filing into consideration, GSTN also took on the performance and stress testing of GST System applications that helped identify and remove bottlenecks in the software. Another major aspect which made this possible is the upgradation of core infrastructure components of GST System, especially widening of entry points into the system resulting in remarkable enhancement in GST System's concurrency limits.
It is noteworthy to mention that the number of active taxpayers has effectively doubled since the launch of GST at approximately 1.3 crore. As per the GSTN data, September 2020 witnessed a sudden jump in the filing of GSTR-3B, the monthly return filed by the normal taxpayers.
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This surge was due to the backlog in filing of previous months' returns also for which relaxations were provided to taxpayers in view of the COVID-19 outbreak. The subsequent month also saw increased traffic which was successfully handled by the GST portal.
The data reflects the overall enhancement in efficiency of the GST portal. GSTN undertook a massive exercise to overhaul the software, hardware and platforms that played a significant role in sustaining this huge workload on GST System. GSTN performed removal of redundant processing required for taxpayer requests, optimiesd taxpayer workload management by creating distinct processing pipelines depending upon the size of taxpayer's upload of invoice data, tuning system and database parameters etc.