GSTN has over-invested in state-of-the-art technologies and processes

The government has recently completed one year of the roll-out of GST. It can be argued that India has come a long way from a complicated taxation system, with over a dozen different taxes and many more cesses. GSTN operates the IT backbone for the collection of GST data of over 1.11 crore registered business entities. Nitin Mishra, EVP (Technology), GSTN, talks about this mammoth network and how the technology piece played its role

What went behind designing and building of GSTN; could you talk about the unique challenges?
The designing of a system of unprecedented tax regime at the scale of merging tax systems of 36 states/UTs and CBEC into a single system was a mammoth task; that too without any reference to start with. While building its architecture, it was supposed to be flexible, yet robust enough to handle traffic of 1.3 crore taxpayers. The use of open source technologies and platform design philosophy enabled the GST System to operate without tight integration within or external technology verticals and platform. The choice of technology principles, tools and architecture also provided for Highly Available Fault Tolerant (HAFT) system, ensuring failure proofing. Moreover, we had to design a system on which various external entities could be connected; this was achieved by adopting a platform approach which enabled us to integrate banks, RBI, GST Suvidha Providers and many more. The other aspect we had to keep in mind was that the requirements were changing rapidly on account of changes made in the law and rules. For this, we used the agile method, but we still had to do a lot of rework.

Information and data security in GST System was an overarching theme, and multi-tier design ensured that the sensitive and valuable information stayed deep into the technology system. GSTN has over-invested into state-of-the-art technologies, processes and governance framework to ensure maximum possible security of stakeholder data. GSTN also ensured “need-to-know-need to do” principle to establish proper role based data access, which provides for boundaries in which any data set, individually or collectively is made visible. All data in flight is always encrypted. Sensitive data sets within the GST Data System are also encrypted at rest as well as on flight.

After designing the network, another big task was training – we had trained more than 60,000 tax officers in a short period of time on the new system. This was done by training 300 master trainers, who in turn, not only trained remaining tax officers, but also the taxpayers and consultants through industry and trade associations. We also released more than 40 short duration videos apart from detailed user manuals. A large number of webinars in various languages have been conducted.

The last part was about enabling a large number of return-filing on the last date. To achieve this, two things were done. The first was to tune the software to increase the throughput. Starting with circuit breaker at 80,000 concurrent users, we have gone to 130,000 concurrent users. The other methodology was to provide offline tools to enable taxpayers to prepare the return offline and then come to portal only for filing the prepared return.

What has been the impact of emerging technologies? Please provide an overview of how IT is being used in building the GSTN infrastructure?
GST System has been developed on an open-source technology platform. Almost all components providing services to our stakeholders such as taxpayers, government authorities and accounting and audit authorities, are developed in loosely bound, well defined APIs. While the information security and technology infrastructure was procured from leading manufacturers, the core of GST System has been developed using open source technologies. GST System is designed using open-data formats and has employed an open architecture. This strategy provides for seamless interchange of information between diverse systems. The diverse system can either directly consume this data after downloading or may integrate through exposed REST-based APIs. The technology used, in itself, is horizontally scalable. This approach ensures that the system capacity can be increased by simply installing some more hardware behind application without affecting the user experience.

Redundancy within GST System, on stateless layers like web servers, application servers and on storage layer, ensures high data fidelity; application availability is also not lost in case of a component failure. A new concept of DC/NDC and DR/NDR across two distinct geographies ensures continuity in business, should a disaster strike. The introduction of Near DC (NDC) and Near DR (NDR) ensures zero data loss, if the disaster strike is sudden and does not offer any recovery from the main data centre.

How is technology being used for boosting productivity and bringing efficiency in the entire system?
Organisation of information and digitisation of applications, in itself, brings a suitable amount of efficiency in business processes. The resulting transparency automatically leads to efficiency in transactions between stakeholders. The introduction of GST has effectively reduced the information asymmetry, which in turn, resulted in significant reduction in transaction cost across the ecosystem. With the advent of new technologies, the tax compliance has become convenient as the complex business processes have been abstracted behind workflow-based system design. A centralised approach to bring complex tax system to a single point interface with stakeholders has resulted in optimum utilisation of the system and human resources. The availability of granular data on invoice and HSN has proved to be a big tool for improving the compliance. This data for the whole country, available at one place, can be also used for policy purposes apart from increasing compliance. Use of simple analytics has started providing excellent information.

What are the IT initiatives planned to further solidify the GSTN?
At present, we are continuously improving taxpayers’ interaction with the GST Portal. Our current focus is to ensure availability of all GST services to our taxpayers and authorities in a seamless manner. Our current focus is now on making our system more robust in terms of handling loads beyond 1.3 crore taxpayers, application durability and navigation to ensure better user experience. We are also enhancing our offline tools to provide more freedom at the hands of taxpayers to work on compliance-related activities offline. This will also involve a tool that will enable taxpayers to do their business accounting in a digital way.

What best practices have you implemented while building the IT infrastructure for GST?
GST System shall be certified for ISO 27000 and ISO 22001 for security and application services standard. Besides investing heavily in state-of-the-art security apparatus, a robust processes framework has also been established with respect to how the GST System shall be accessed by its stakeholders. Access is only provided on need-to-know, need-to-do basis. A strong role-based authorisation model has been implemented in GST System, so that only authorised persons to have access to designated data, after due verification. GSTN has developed strong governance mechanisms to monitor adherence to set processes and principles.