It's all unofficial.

"The Centre would aim for a lower deficit in the 2024-25 fiscal year despite increasing capital expenditure to a record level in the Union Budget 2024, as per a Reuters poll of economists." "The government is aiming to narrow the fiscal deficit to 4.50% of GDP by the end of the 2025-26 fiscal year (FY) from 5.90% in the current year to the end of March." Should be very easy. "India's net direct tax collection increased 19% on an annual basis to Rs 14.70 trillion till January 11, the official government data showed." "The growth rate in gross Corporate Income Tax (CIT) and Personal Income Tax (PIT) is 8.32% and 26.11% respectively." ET. "India's GST collections rose 10.28% to reach Rs 1.65 trillion in December, the Finance Ministry announced." It was 13% higher than GST collections in December last year. ET. "The growth rate of GST has been phenomenal in terms of collections which have grown from Rs 7.19 trillion in FY 2017-18 (from July 2017) to Rs 18.10 trillion in FY 2022-23." TOI. This miracle has been achieved through: 1. Repression. "With recent changes in the input tax credit (ITC) provisions, the credit of recipient has been restricted due to various non-compliance on part of the supplier." "Such stringent restrictions are levied on the recipient irrespective of the genuineness on the transactions undertaken by them. This results in a huge blockage of working capital and high working capital cost." GST was supposed to eliminate cascading taxes, reduce inflation and simplify the process. cleartax. Instead, GST has increased the cost of compliance and raised prices. 2. Inflation. GST collections have benefited hugely from inflation, which it is causing in part. The average rate of inflation of the consumer price index (CPI) in calendar years 2017 to 2019 was below 4%. This jumped to 6.6% in 2020 and has stayed way above 4% since then. RI. Since GST is a consumption tax, the higher the price the higher the collection. Inflation helps the government. Higher inflation increases nominal tax revenues by increasing VAT (GST) collections, reduces the real value of government debt and enables the government to freeze income tax thresholds so more workers pay higher taxes. Economics Help. "For consumers, inflation is an added 'tax' to the price they pay for everything.., a tax that is just not officially levied by the government. In India's deeply stratified society, low-income households struggle even more from 'inflation tax'," wrote Prof Deepanshu Mohan. "When inflation is still above 5.5%, in fact closer to 6%, our monetary policy has to remain actively disinflationary," said Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das at the highly exclusive and expensive resort of Davos in Switzerland. And so, the RBI "opted to maintain the repo rate at 6.5% for the fifth consecutive time" at its meeting in December 2023. ET. Junkets are expensive. Stop complaining.