When the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government introduced the Goods and Services Tax in July seven years ago, it ushered in the regime with a ceremony befitting a win. The halls of Parliament were bedecked, a special midnight sitting of the Houses was called and people took to the streets with “Welcome GST” banners. 1 July began to be celebrated as GST Day. Overall, it was an unusual celebration over a tax levy.

Before the GST was rolled out, the Centre and states imposed multiple indirect taxes such as sales tax, excise duty, luxury tax and octroi. GST was aimed at simplifying this by uniformly levying tax on the final market price of goods and services in the country. Everything that you now pay for—from movie tickets, to accountant fees and your coffee—has a GST component to it. The agency collecting it from you against a bill has to then pay it to the government, thus the indirect incidence. At present, GST is levied under 5 slabs: 0%, 5%, 12%, 18% and 28%, split between the central and state governments.

Touted as a simplified solution replacing the older Value Added Tax, GST has been the current government’s pride. So much so, that on the first day of every month, it issued a detailed statement on how much tax it collected, giving a state-wise break-up. But something changed this month.

GST collection in June touched Rs 1.74 lakh crore, registering a 7.7% year-on-year growth. But instead of a press release from the Press Information Bureau, reporters were given this “source-based” headline data on gross GST collection. Several publications reported that the Finance Ministry was discontinuing releasing detailed GST data, specifically numbers related to state-wise collections, but no official reason was given for doing so.

Naturally, this has been the top-most question on the mind of most India economy watchers: what changed for the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government to stop sharing the numbers? And, in its absence, should we be worried?

Why stop sharing data? The government has so far not offered an explanation. But the timing of the move raises questions. Not only does this come soon after the general elections, where the BJP won less favourably than its last term and seemed to struggle to stitch together an alliance, it also comes weeks ahead of the annual Budget, where industries have sought relief from taxes.

According to The Print’s report, stopping this release may have something to do with the government trying to create a more favourable image of itself. The report, citing unnamed government officials, said that robust GST collections have bred “resentment” among citizens that the government was collecting too much tax. “GST collections have been very buoyant, and people are seeing the high absolute figures. This is creating resentment that the government is ‘sucking the people dry’ or that it is collecting too much tax,” one of the officials told the publication.

“The point is not that we are hiding the data… we are not going to be drum-beating about it,” another official told the publication.

Also, remember that the monsoon months between June and August generally see higher food inflation owing to rise in prices of seasonal commodities. We have written about why this happens in the case of tomatoes in an earlier edition of news explainer. The reason we mention this is because, again, timing matters. At a time when citizens find it hard to procure everyday goods owing to rising prices, headlines boasting of high tax collections may not be a great look for the government, even if those goods are unrelated to GST.

And the outrage makes sense because GST, which charges all consumption uniformly, irrespective of income, creates a sense of disparity owing to its very nature. We have previously written about how the bottom 50% are paying a disproportionate 64.3% of goods and service tax while the top 10% contribute just 3-4%. As Oxfam’s report also highlights, the bottom 50% of the country shells out a much higher share of its income on GST than the top 10%. For more on this, read: Do too few Indians pay tax?

“Currently, collections are robust, but there may be a case of some negative feedback on the constant boasting of tax collections by the government as it impacts consumers,” a finance ministry official told Informist. “There has been representation from a few states as well that the GST regime has benefitted the Centre more than states,” the report cited this official as saying.

The concerns are valid. Gross GST collections have seen a significant jump since their inception. In the first two months of the current financial year, the government had mopped up Rs 3.83 lakh crore in GST. “This represents an impressive 11.3 per cent year-on-year growth,” the 1 June release said.

Over the years, while the government has patted itself on the back for these record GST collections, taxpayers have, especially on social media, expressed outrage over the increase in overall tax burden.

Is releasing GST data important? Views on whether the GST data is relevant are divided. Some believe that the gross tax collections don’t hold much value except showing that there’s high tax compliance while others maintain that it’s an important economic indicator.

“It is just a data point that says something—sometimes positive and sometimes negative,” the ministry official cited by Informist said.

“It serves as a crucial tool for policymakers in devising effective strategies for economic management and budgetary planning,” Sandeep Sehgal, partner at tax consulting firm AKM Global told Business Today. He added that GST is a good data point to understand economic trends and evaluate fiscal health.

But does higher tax collection necessarily imply higher taxation? It does not. It just means that the tax base has widened because it’s almost impossible to evade GST.

“The effective tax rate under GST has in fact reduced from what we had earlier, the effective rate being lower than the revenue-neutral rate we were aspiring for,” PwC India partner Pratik Jain told The Print. “So, the increase in collections is not because the tax incidence has increased,” he said.

Also, it’s important to remember that collections do not necessarily mean the government has better revenues. And budgetary deficits make this clear.

As former chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian had pointed out, it is data on net refunds issued and actual revenues to the government as a result of this GST that should be given more importance than headline collections.

“The focus was on collections, because refunds were not published and we were looking at the wrong number…Because we are not getting refunds data, we are under the impression that revenues are doing very well,” he said at a seminar at the beginning of this year.

To be clear, refunds under the GST are usually for exporters who don’t sell the goods in India and are hence entitled to receive a refund of the taxes they have paid on the inputs. It may arise in a few other circumstances too.

Going by this, gross numbers seem to make little difference. So, what are the concerns if this data is not published?

A transparency question: First, without a detailed statement, it will be hard to ascertain the state-wise GST collections, which form a crucial component of states’ earnings.

Secondly, GST collections are still important for assessing overall consumption.

“GST data and its breakup is an important indicator of consumption patterns and so, doing away with the breakup is a blow to the analysis of the economy on a rolling basis,” The Print cited an unnamed economist as saying. “It also reinforces the perception that this government does not like to share data.”

That brings us to the third point about transparency. Amid the current trust deficit in the country’s governance, stopping the publication of a metric that was tracked by many financial analysts could be counterproductive and raise doubts over the finance ministry’s intent.