The Modi Government has started the new fiscal with some good news on the economic front — the Centre’s indirect tax collections for 2014-15 have exceeded the revised estimate.

As against the revised estimate of ₹5.42-lakh crore, the actual indirect tax collections have touched ₹5.46-lakh crore, an increase of ₹4,000 crore, official data released on Thursday showed.

This is commendable despite Finance Minister Arun Jaitley sharply scaling down the indirect tax collection target for 2014-15 by about ₹82,000 crore when he presented his first full Budget on February 28.

The collections for 2014-15 reflect a 9.9 per cent growth over the actuals of ₹4.97-lakh crore in 2013-14. Tax experts, however, don’t see the 20 per cent overall growth target for indirect taxes for 2015-16 as a steep hurdle for the Government.

“This fiscal (2015-16) is not going to be a difficult year as the previous one. The mathematics on indirect tax revenue projections (for 2015-16) looks much better this year. Last year’s was a much stretched target,” Pratik Jain, Partner-Indirect Taxes, KPMG India, told BusinessLine .

Positive about this fiscal So, where is the additional ₹1.05-lakh crore in indirect tax revenues going to come from during 2015-16 when compared to the revised estimates of 2014-15?

R Murlidharan, Senior Director, Deloitte in India, said the target for 2015-16 “looks achievable” given the expected push to manufacturing through ‘Make in India’ and the fact that service tax rates have been increased by two percentage points, from 12 per cent to 14 per cent.

The Centre expects the service tax kitty to rise ₹41,000 crore, excise duty by ₹44,000 crore and customs duty by ₹20,000 crore.

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