The country’s top 100 companies, led by ONGC and Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), have paid Rs 12,661.73 crore in advance tax to the government in the first quarter of this fiscal, representing an 18.68 per cent jump over the same period last fiscal.
But some large corporates like State Bank of India, Grasim Industries, ACC, Ambuja Cement, Siemens, Deutsche Bank, Barclays Bank, and Bank of America, paid less tax to the exchequer compared to the year-ago period, according to the finance ministry sources.
ONGC has paid the highest tax at Rs 1,093 crore, up 24.20 per cent from Rs 880 it had paid in the first quarter of the last fiscal, the sources said.
This is followed by SBI which has paid Rs 869 crore, which is a steep 18.63 per cent less than Rs 1,068 crore it had paid in Q1 last fiscal. However, the bank comes up as the second largest tax payee. The tax outgo of RIL stood at Rs 653 crore this quarter, more than double the Rs 314-crore it had paid in the same period last fiscal.
Mirroring an uptick in the economy, corporate India’s advance tax payments have jumped sharply in the April-June quarter of this fiscal. The tax payments are in line with industrial production, which zoomed by 17.6 per cent in April, the first month of the current fiscal, from 1.1 per cent in the same period a year ago.
The GDP during the current fiscal is estimated to grow by 8.5 per cent from 7.4 per cent in the last fiscal. The indirect taxes mop-up, which include customs, excise and service tax, too went up by 49 per cent to about Rs 35,000 crore during April-May 2010-11. The government proposes to collect Rs 3.01 lakh crore as corporate tax during the current fiscal, up from Rs 2.5 lakh crore in the previous fiscal. — PTI