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. In an interaction with ECs Sandhya Michu, Nitin Mishra, EVP (Technology), GSTN, talks about this mammoth network and how the technology piece played its role.

- Sandhya Michu

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 multitier 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.