60,000 e-way bills generated per hour, expected to go up, says Aadhaar chief

Hasmukh Adhia, Finance Secretary, on Monday said after the commencement of the e-way Bill on Sunday, there had been no glitches in the system to file for the said bill.

Ajay Bhushan Pandey, Chief Executive Officer of  Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), added that 2.59 lakh e-way Bills had been generated on Sunday, and an additional 2.89 lakh were registered on Monday until 4 PM.

"As of now, 60,000 bills are generated per hour and the number is expected to  go further up," Pandey said in a press conference.

To avoid further glitches, as many as, 100 agents have been hired by the government who are working online to help out taxpayers and any confusion related to the bill, he said.

The electronic way (E-Way) Bill, introduced under the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime, rolled out across the country from Sunday. This was the second attempt at implementing the system while the first was in February.

Kumar said that around 11 lakh businesses and transporters as well as 20,000 transporters have registered on the e-way bill platform, and expected most registrations to take place at the last minute.

Pandey added that the inter-state flow of goods will be done smoothly and the intra-state for first batch of  the trade is on track so far.

About 1.05 crore businesses have registered under the new GST regime, of which around 70,00,000 are filing returns.

Rohan Shah, a tax expert said the e-way Bill will promote a robust tax compliance if all taxpayers are a part of the system. He, however, said that this move will affect the trade and commerce if the e-way bill system does not get adopted.

The e-way Bill, at present, applies to inter-state transportation of goods worth over Rs 50,000 via road, railways, airways and vessels.

The Finance Ministry clarified on Saturday that a single e-way Bill will apply even in cases of a break in journey to destination and where more than one transporter is involved in the transportation of goods.

On February 1, the first day of compulsory application of e-way Bill, saw massive disruptions as the site crashed and taxpayers could not generate the document.

However, a non-functioning site was not the only problem.There were few specific situations where people were struggling with e-way bills.

The GST Council had pushed for an e-way bill in an emergency meeting in December last year, where the council took it up as the sole agenda through video-conferencing, suggesting the urgency of the issue.

GST collections for the month of November had come in abysmally low and this had led to panic in the government. There was a fear that there were transactions where GST had to be paid, but was not paid. The application of e-way Bill was moved forward to February 1 to arrest this issue.

The system was initially made mandatory from 1 February but due technological glitches it led to long delays in bill generation, forcing deferment of the rollout.