Is GSTN ready in terms of load on the network?
The law mandates all existing tax payers (of taxes getting subsumed in GST) should be migrated to the new regime. Second, the facility for registering new tax payers must be ready. We collected data of 90 lakh tax payers from state tax departments and the CBEC. We verified the PAN number with the CBDT database. There were many fake PAN numbers. All mismatches were sent to the tax authorities and finally ended with PANs for 80 lakh verified tax payers.
We sent that with password for each taxpayer to the respective tax departments to pass it on to the taxpayer and tell him that he can use the provisional ID (for GSTIN) to log on to the website and create their account and provide whatever information required. Of that 60.5 lakh created accounts. Another 6 lakh registered during June 1-15.
What is the network's readiness?
We prepared for concurrency (number of users the system can handle at the same time) of 60,000 users per second. But we are keeping infrastructure on standby and will quickly expand capacity if it exceeds. The redundancy is 2x (1.2 lakh per second). Of 29 states, 20 states and all 7 union territories have come to us to create their networks. Nine states and CBEC are doing it themselves.
Are you prepared for 300 crore transactions per month?
Yes. The new thing under GST is the provision of invoice data for all B2B transactions. We got data from nine states. Average invoices per month per dealer were 127, but it ranged from a low of 10 invoices to 28 lakh invoices in a month. We had to devise a system that could handle this. To size the system, looking at an average of 127, we took three times that, 400, as the average number of invoices. That multiplied by 80 lakh tax payers gives you 320 crore invoices per month. Since uploading of invoices will be the main activity we are opening the facility for upload of invoice data from July 16.