Chennai: While saying it is happy to note the increase in the October 2020 GST collections as compared to October 2019 to an extent of over 10 per cent, Consortium of Indian Associations (CIA) has however said it should have been much more if the economy and business sales had returned to normal.
In a statement, CIA convenor K E Raghunathan said, “normally, October collections of GST relates to sales that happened in September. The total unlock phase with unrestricted movements, e-pass abolishment, public transport restart happened from 1 September and many companies raised sale invoices in September by pushing out their finished products which they had planned in March itself during September 2020 and also executed various site activities for which deliveries were made in March. Therefore, increase of October collection can not be taken as return of normalcy completely.”
He added: “We need to await for data of collection in November (which is October sales) and December (which is November sales). If we surpass over Rs 1,10,000 crore in November and December we can confidently say, we have reached economy rebound to pre-Covid days.”
He further said the biggest question hangs on the second wave fear, apart from contribution of increased festival sales in this period of October and November performance.