Bihar derives STAMINA for e-governance

Bihar has a successful project to its name—the Sales Tax Administration Management Information Network Aided (STAMINA). The implementation of this project in the state has resulted in a jump in sales tax revenues by Rs 50 crore last year. And by the end of this year the state is looking at a revenue figure of Rs 300 crore.

The commercial tax department of Bihar administers seven tax acts, namely—Bihar sales tax, Central sales tax, entry tax, entertainment tax, electricity duties, advertisement tax and hotel and luxury tax. Put together they constitute almost 65-70 percent of the state’s tax revenue. This figure alone is enough to convince someone about the importance of such an activity and the need for effective and efficient management. With a registered base of thousands of dealers across the state, the paperwork generated through lakhs of transactions of payments and returns, through filing of returns by dealers and submission of challans, etc runs into proportions where an entire year would not be enough to process the material. Timely scrutiny of this pile of paperwork can easily make it possible to catch hold of tax evaders and prevent evasion.

STAMINA was designed to deliver effective and efficient sales tax administration management in Bihar. It also provides a complete tracking mechanism of every kind of transaction. Due to the use of STAMINA software, commodity-wise tax collection figures make it much easier to deal with issues related to tax policy and enables the top management to make decisions on tax structure. Since STAMINA crunches the sea of raw data involving ratios of gross turnover to taxable turnover, or to claims or to tax paid by major companies, it successfully brings to surface the facts that help point at incidents of tax evasion or its suppression.

When analysing at the micro-level, each dealer’s previous transactional records become the input for STAMINA. The package is fully powered to catch any incident where a possibility of suppression of sales or evasion of taxes exists. This single capability has been of great advantage to users of STAMINA since now they find themselves in a position to direct their enquiries at the most promising cases of defaulting dealers and recover dues owed by them.

The utility of this package can be judged by the relief that it offers to various officers, assistants and dealers as well regarding proof of submission of payment and returns. This package also reduces unnecessary harassment of the dealers who used to receive repeated complaints of missing challans and returns, and that too at an administrative cost.

STAMINA is based on client/server architecture. In this system, Windows NT server runs Oracle 8i RDBMS at the back-end and on the client systems. User interface interwoven with complex business rules is managed under Developer 2000. The STAMINA set-up is modular in nature and that’s why it has the flexibility of easier maintenance. It has got different modules like dealer master, payment and returns, statutory forms, inspection refund, assessment, and other modules to address different queries.

STAMINA has been running in Bihar for quite some time now and has already had a major impact. Overall, the Bihar circle experienced a 13 percent growth in 2001-02, whereas the Patna circle alone has experienced a 26 percent growth in tax collection in 2001-02. 32 circles are already using STAMINA and the government is planning to implement it in the remaining circles very soon. This will definitely lay down the foundation of information technology across the state. And, this in turn will facilitate ready availability of crucial information at the divisional as well as the headquarters level.