Meghalaya Govt introduces QR code to increase excise revenue by 5 to 10%: CM

Syllad | The Rising MeghalayaSeptember 25, 2024

The state government has decided to introduce the QR code based tracking system for different products sold by the excise department to plug the leakages and increase the revenue generation by 5 to 10 percent. 

Addressing media persons after chairing a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, chief minister Conrad K Sangma said, “We have cleared the proposal to have a QR code based tracking system for the different products being sold by the excise department, which basically in simple terms means that every bottle that is going to be sold in Meghalaya is going to have a QR code on it. This will help us to track the entire journey of the bottle so that we know exactly where it has gone and which shop it was supposed to be sold, and if there is any leakage in the system.”

“We are expecting that this will have anything between 5% to 10% impact on the overall revenue and the leakage that we are seeing in today’s system will be plugged by the use of the QR code technology,” he added. 

Asked, Sangma said the revenue generation of the excise department is expected to increase by 5 to 10 %.

According to him, the proposal is meant to streamline the entire process to ensure there is no revenue leakage.

“Whatever we have done in the past it has helped us. That is why today our revenue has gone up 3 times compared to what it was in 2017. We are at 3 times higher revenue better becuase of the steps we took in the last five years. We are hopeful this will again be another step forward in monitoring the leakages and it will again increase the revenue,” the CM stated.

Further, Sangma also informed that the cabinet has approved the proposal for issuing a composite license for hotels.

“This is being done in view of the different hostels, especially the 5Star hotels that have come up and that are going to come up in the future to give it a more structured system,”he said.

He said earlier, the licenses were given to the different hotels, were based on restuarants or the bars, which means if a particular hotels had four bars or four restuarants, then they would have to take four different licenses for each of these different restuarants or bars. 

“Now, the idea is to give one composite license to the entire entity so that they don’t have to apply for separate licenses and obviously the charges for these are going to be higher compared to the normar bar licenses and that is the amendment proposed today by the excise department and we have cleared that and so the proposal for the composite license for hotels has been cleared today by the cabinet,” he said.