‘Keep truck owners, drivers out of GST purview’

To prevent the derailment of the proposed rollout of GST from July 1, the Indian Foundation of Transport Research and Training (IFTRT), an independent transport research body, has called for keeping truck owners and drivers out of the GST ambit.

“They should not be asked to register under the Goods and Services Tax (GST) network as they only carry the electronic way bills numbers (EBN) of goods booked by the common carriers,” SP Singh, Senior Fellow, IFTRT, said.

He said both the truck driver and owner are registered under the government’s national register as Vahan and Sarathi.

Don’t detain trucks “The truck driver is not privy to any declaration by suppliers, transporters or receivers and hence, they should not be unduly held or detained. Any provision to detain trucks after offloading should be reviewed,” Singh said, adding that if goods are stopped on the roads, then these small problems could be misused by people who do not want GST to be rolled out.

Almost 80 per cent of goods moved by surface transport within the country are by road transport and, in value terms, 90 per cent of total cargo value is carried by truck drivers.

Key objective “The key objective of GST is to provide seamless travel and make India a common market with an integrated GST regime. The disruptive and unscrupulous elements among suppliers, who have an unholy nexus with transporters, may use this as tool to flare up an agitation before GST implementation by misguiding the hapless mass of truckers, who generally do not have any nexus with consignor or consignee because the owner only lets out his truck to ferry goods on the documents and EBN provided to him,” said Singh.

IFTRT said the GSTN authorities, while introducing EBN for smooth passage of goods carriers on highways to eliminate undue harassment to truck drivers, should not seize trucks. Only red-flagged consignments should be offloaded and the vehicle should be let off.

Under-reporting According to IFTRT, at present, some 40-50 per cent of goods moved by road, at a conservative estimate, are under-reported. Under these circumstances, at least having an EBN system to collect data from consignments above ₹50,000 is fair and equitable to suppliers, transporters and receivers.

The research body also expressed concern over the load that GSTN portal can take. In case an enforcement officer decides at random to inspect a truck and check the veracity of the declaration by matching with the EBN at a time when the GSTN portal is not functioning, then the vehicle should not be detained beyond 30 minutes.

In case of mismatch or wrong declaration by transporters, goods may be offloaded at the risk and cost of supplier/common carrier/ transporter and concerned vehicle should be allowed to go so that other consignments in the truck belonging to several receivers are not held up.

Opportunities and challenges

Cleartax.com identifies a challenging situation in implementing e-way bills. For instance, when a truck breaks down on the road, the entire cargo needs to be shifted to another truck and all e-way bills need to be updated at the government end.

It is here that companies such as Cleartax.com see an opportunity. The company is helping large logistics and e-commerce players get GST-ready and tackle e-way bill solutions, Prashanth Nair, VP-head of engineering, Cleartax.com, told BusinessLine . Cleartax.com does not want the e-commerce delivery man or the truck driver to undergo massive training and is developing a mobile app for the same. The product should be intuitive enough for the driver to update the information to the control centre, along with the updated e-way bill, he added.

“We are trying to rope in some prominent e-commerce and logistics companies,” Nair said, declining to name any customers.