September opened with the July-August truce already fraying: fresh US-Iran strikes on September 1 pushed Brent back above $91, and by September 8–9 the benchmark had climbed past $97, briefly trading above $101 a barrel as Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Navy struck oil tankers near Kharg Island and warned that Gulf energy infrastructure remained a target. Indian equities tracked the volatility closely: after closing August at Sensex 76,957 and Nifty 24,080, the indices slid through the first half of the month — touching lows near Sensex 74,205 and Nifty 23,236 around September 11 — before a modest, uneven recovery into the third week as oil eased back from its highs. By September 21–22, the Sensex and Nifty were holding in the 74,850–75,000 and 23,400–23,470 range respectively, down roughly 2.5–2.8% for the month, with foreign institutional investors net sellers on most sessions even as domestic institutions kept buying the dips.
The month’s standout event was diplomatic rather than financial: New Delhi hosted the 18th BRICS Summit on September 12–13 at Bharat Mandapam, bringing together leaders including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping under India’s 2026 chairship theme of “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.” The summit unanimously adopted the New Delhi Declaration, with Prime Minister Modi hailing a bloc “wider in reach and stronger in purpose,” China’s noted support for India’s push for permanent UN Security Council membership, and broad condemnation of cross-border terrorism. The summit’s scale — and the accompanying security footprint — was significant enough that the government postponed the next GST Council meeting, originally set for September 12, to October 7. Markets took a second hit late in the month when President Trump extended the $100,000 H-1B visa fee for another year on September 19, pressuring IT stocks into the September 26 close of a sixth straight losing session for the broader index.
“The New Delhi Declaration reflects the confidence of a grouping that is now wider in reach and stronger in purpose.”
— Prime Minister Narendra Modi, 18th BRICS Summit, September 12, 2026Held at the conch-shell-shaped Bharat Mandapam, the summit drew leaders and representatives from all 11 full BRICS members plus 10 partner countries. Beyond the New Delhi Declaration, the two-day event featured a Bharat Innovation Exposition, discussions on cross-border payment mechanisms and supply-chain resilience, and a formal handover of the BRICS chairship to China for 2027 — capping what officials called India’s most significant hosting moment of the year, coming just months after the country absorbed a direct economic shock from the Iran war.
Nifty IT slipped roughly 0.7% in early trade on September 21 after President Trump extended the $100,000 H-1B visa fee for a further year, with the administration citing a 92% decline in H-1B registrations by large IT outsourcing firms as evidence the policy was working as intended. The extension does not apply to visa renewals, offering some relief, but it lands just weeks before India’s IT majors open their Q2 FY27 earnings season in October — leaving the sector’s next major re-rating catalyst still to come.
With no scheduled MPC meeting in September, the repo rate carried over unchanged at 5.25% from the August 5 decision, alongside the Standing Deposit Facility at 5.00% and the Marginal Standing Facility/Bank Rate at 5.50%. Governor Sanjay Malhotra’s August statement — the fifth consecutive hold, following an easing cycle that took the rate from 6.50% at the start of 2025 down to 5.25% by December 2025 — described India as remaining “the world’s fastest-growing large economy” while flagging that headline inflation would likely rise near-term on oil and food prices before peaking in the third quarter and declining thereafter. The committee’s decision to lower its FY27 inflation forecast to around 5% even as it raised the GDP growth outlook to 6.7% was read by most desks as a signal that the RBI sees the economy’s underlying resilience as outweighing near-term, war-driven price pressure.
That assumption faced its sharpest test of the month when Brent crude spiked back above $101/bbl in the first two weeks of September on fresh US-Iran strikes near the Strait of Hormuz — a level that, if sustained, would sit well outside the RBI’s comfort zone for FY27 inflation. Crude’s retreat toward the high-$80s by the third week of the month, alongside a modest equity-market recovery on September 21 tied to the same oil pullback, offered some relief heading into the RBI’s next scheduled review on October 5–7, which will be the first MPC meeting to fully digest both the BRICS summit’s diplomatic dividend and a full month of war-driven crude volatility since the August decision.
In one of the month’s most closely watched lending decisions, a State Bank of India-led group — including Union Bank of India and NaBFID — moved to approve roughly $3.5 billion in debt financing for Vodafone Idea, subject to promoter guarantees and Kumar Mangalam Birla remaining chairman for the loan’s near-decade tenure. The funding, part of a ₹35,000 crore requirement backing a ₹45,000 crore three-year capex plan, is a significant vote of confidence in the telecom sector’s turnaround after years of financial distress; private-sector lender sign-off remains the final gating item before disbursement.
With no policy catalyst of its own this month, the banking sector largely moved with the broader market — under pressure through the first two weeks as crude spiked and FIIs sold, before stabilising into the back half of September. Analysts continued to highlight resilient asset quality and steady credit growth at large private banks as reasons to expect relative outperformance once the October MPC meeting and Q2 FY27 earnings season provide the next clear signal.
The war that began February 28, 2026, turned seven months old in September with no durable resolution in sight. The month opened with the US and Iran trading direct strikes for the first time in roughly a month, and Brent crude — which had closed August near $89 — climbed steadily to above $97 by September 8 and briefly topped $101 the following day as Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Navy struck three oil tankers over the weekend, including one near Kharg Island, Iran’s main export hub, and warned that Gulf energy infrastructure remained vulnerable to further attack. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil passes in peacetime — fell to as few as four to seven vessels a day against a pre-war daily average of 138, and Iran added to a blacklist that by late August already ran to 45 tankers it deemed non-compliant with its rules for the waterway.
The month’s starkest single incident came on September 15, when Iran’s IRGC said a supertanker identified as EL GAIA exploded and caught fire after striking naval mines while attempting an unauthorised route through the strait — the clearest evidence yet that Tehran continues to treat large parts of the waterway as mined and closed. Iran also declared a new restricted maritime zone near Hormuz in the first week of the month. On the other side, the US-led naval blockade — reimposed in mid-July — had by September 7 redirected 94 commercial vessels attempting to run it, disabled three that did not comply, and boarded two to enforce compliance, according to shipping-security trackers; US Energy Secretary Chris Wright maintained that roughly 8 million barrels a day were still moving through the strait “thanks to the US Navy.” By late September, with no new serious incidents reported for over two weeks, crude eased back toward $88–90, and equity markets on September 21 rallied modestly on the relief — though seven months of broken truces argue against reading any single quiet week as durable.
“The Strait of Hormuz remains closed and under the control of Iran’s naval forces.”
— IRGC Navy statement, Sepah News, September 15, 2026With crude having traded across a roughly $13 range within September alone — from below $88 to above $101 — Indian refiners and city gas distributors continued to face the same pooled-pricing and margin-compression pressures that have defined the year. Diversified sourcing from Russia, the US and West Africa remains the operative near-term hedge for Indian refiners, with the domestic industrial gas rationing regime under the Essential Commodities Act still in force pending durable de-escalation.
ADNOC’s purchase of five VLCCs for $590 million in late July — an expansion of its own fleet capacity to insulate against the Red Sea and Hormuz disruptions — set the tone for a September in which Gulf exporters increasingly treated elevated war-risk shipping costs and tanker scarcity as a structural, multi-year feature rather than a temporary spike, a dynamic Indian LNG and crude importers are increasingly being forced to plan around as well.
Kia India kicked off the festive launch season on September 4 with the seven-seat Sorento, its first ICE-powered, all-wheel-drive SUV for the Indian market, positioned above the Syros EV and Carens Clavis EV in Kia’s growing local line-up. The launch was quickly followed by a wave of confirmed and expected arrivals through September and October: Renault’s Duster Hybrid, a facelifted three-door Mahindra Thar, and updates to the Skoda Slavia and Tata Tigor, alongside strong-hybrid pushes from Hyundai’s Creta and Kia’s Seltos. Industry trackers describe the period as one of the most active festive launch windows in years, with manufacturers timing new metal, discounts on outgoing models and financing offers to coincide with Navratri and Diwali footfall.
The season’s most closely watched arrival remains the Tata Safari EV, confirmed for a Diwali 2026 window as Tata’s entry into the three-row electric SUV segment at an expected ₹23–30 lakh, following on from the Sierra EV’s strong reception earlier in the year. Elsewhere in the EV calendar, Honda’s first India EV (based on the Elevate) and Mahindra’s Thar.e were both flagged for around-August windows, while BYD’s Seal U plug-in hybrid and further compact EVs from VinFast and BYD are pencilled in for late 2026. With crude having swung through a roughly $13 range within September alone, automakers continued to lean on fuel-cost-volatility messaging — Battery-as-a-Service financing, buyback guarantees and long battery warranties remain the primary differentiators in an increasingly crowded EV field.
With crude volatility making pure petrol ownership costs unpredictable and public charging infrastructure still uneven outside metro corridors, strong-hybrid SUVs — led by the incoming Renault Duster Hybrid, Hyundai Creta Hybrid and Kia Seltos Hybrid — are increasingly positioned by manufacturers as the pragmatic festive-season choice for buyers not yet ready to commit fully to an EV, particularly in Tier-2 and Tier-3 markets.
With so many new launches converging on the same festive window, dealers report renewed discounting on outgoing petrol and diesel models even as EV and hybrid pricing stays firm, reflecting manufacturers’ calculation that volume on legacy stock now matters more than protecting residual value ahead of the incoming wave of updated and electrified models.
With Organon’s stockholders having approved the merger proposals in July, September brought no new procedural milestones but did surface fuller detail on the transaction’s financing architecture through routine SEC disclosures. The debt financing backing the deal is expected to be supported by a capped guarantee from Sun Pharma itself, contingent on Indian regulatory approval, with an uncapped fallback guarantee from Sun Pharma’s Netherlands and Mauritius holding entities if the capped structure isn’t fully available — alongside a separate $1 billion funding commitment from Sun Pharma under the merger agreement. The remaining conditions to close are now entirely regulatory: expiration of Hart-Scott-Rodino Act waiting periods in the US, plus non-US antitrust and foreign direct investment clearances, none of which had been confirmed as cleared as of month-end.
The deal continues to be framed by Sun Pharma as a platform-building move — Organon’s roughly $6.2 billion in FY25 revenue, its presence in 150 countries and its position as the world’s seventh-largest biosimilar player are expected to nearly double Sun Pharma’s combined EBITDA and cash generation, supporting deleveraging toward a post-transaction net debt/EBITDA of roughly 2.3x. With India’s broader pharma sector continuing to draw steady FII interest through the year’s volatility, market attention through October is likely to centre on any signal of progress in the US antitrust review process, which remains the single largest swing factor for the early-2027 closing target.
The layered guarantee arrangement — a capped Sun Pharma guarantee contingent on Indian regulatory sign-off, with an uncapped fallback from offshore entities — signals that lenders wanted meaningful direct recourse to Sun Pharma’s balance sheet rather than relying solely on Organon’s own cash flows, a structure consistent with the scale of the transaction as Sun Pharma’s largest-ever acquisition.
With the rupee holding in the ₹95 range against the dollar through much of September, dollar-invoicing pharma exporters continued to see some offsetting benefit against elevated freight and crude-linked input costs, a dynamic that has held broadly steady since mid-year even as the underlying West Asia conflict continues to inject volatility into both currency and input-cost lines simultaneously.
September was structurally a quiet month for Indian IT on the fundamentals side — TCS, Infosys and the rest of the sector’s Q2 FY27 (July–September quarter) results are not due until mid-October, leaving the sector to trade largely on macro and policy headlines rather than company-specific news. The dominant story arrived on September 19, when President Trump issued a presidential proclamation extending the $100,000 fee on employers sponsoring new H-1B visa applications for a further year, citing what the administration described as a 92% decline in H-1B registrations by large IT outsourcing firms since the fee was first imposed in 2025 — evidence, in the administration’s framing, that the policy was achieving its stated goal of protecting American jobs. Nifty IT fell roughly 0.7% in early trade on September 21 as the news filtered through, though the extension explicitly excludes visa renewals, offering the sector some cushion relative to the original 2025 shock.
The broader index continued to wobble through the rest of the month on a mix of war-driven risk-off sentiment and persistent foreign-outflow pressure, with September 26 marking a sixth consecutive losing session for the wider market amid what traders described as lingering visa-related unease alongside weak global cues. With the extension leaving legal challenges to the original fee still pending before two federal courts, and Q2 FY27 earnings season opening in October, the sector’s next clear directional signal is likely to come from a combination of that court process and whatever guidance TCS, Infosys and peers offer on discretionary US tech spending and AI-linked deal pipelines when results season begins.
Alongside the fee extension, the administration flagged continued review of whether further action against employers sponsoring H-1B workers is warranted, and reiterated the stated objectives of protecting US economic and national security interests and improving domestic graduates’ access to jobs. For Indian IT services firms, the message reinforces a multi-year planning assumption that offshore delivery ratios, not H-1B-dependent onsite staffing, will remain the primary lever for managing US cost exposure.
After July and August’s return of foreign capital helped power back-to-back monthly market gains, September saw FIIs turn net sellers on most sessions — a reversal analysts attributed to the combination of renewed war-driven risk aversion and the H-1B headline, with domestic institutional buying providing a partial offset but not enough to prevent the broader index’s monthly decline.
September 22, 2026 marked exactly one year since the GST 2.0 overhaul — which collapsed the old four-slab structure into a simplified 5% and 18% system, with a 40% rate for a narrow set of luxury and demerit goods — took effect on September 22, 2025. FMCG companies and retailers used the anniversary as a natural checkpoint heading into the festive season, with the lower effective tax burden on many staple categories continuing to be cited by industry bodies as a structural tailwind for volume growth. August’s GST collections of nearly ₹2 lakh crore (up 14.8% year-on-year, though below July’s record ₹2.11 lakh crore) were read as further evidence that aggregate consumption has stayed resilient through a year marked by war-driven volatility, currency pressure and elevated input costs.
That resilience was tested again mid-month when Brent crude’s spike back above $100/bbl briefly revived the packaging, logistics and palm-oil-derivative cost pressures that had partially eased through the summer, before the subsequent pullback toward $88–90 by month-end offered renewed relief heading into the festive season proper. With Navratri and Diwali both falling within the October–November window this year, September functioned largely as a positioning month — companies finalised festive packaging, promotional calendars and inventory builds even as procurement teams kept dynamic hedging arrangements in place given how quickly crude has swung between $88 and $101 within any given fortnight this year.
August’s 29% year-on-year jump in import GST revenue, against a more modest 9.3% rise in domestic collections, is partly mechanical — higher crude import valuations feed directly into import GST even without any change in physical volumes — a distinction FMCG and macro analysts are watching closely to avoid overreading headline collection growth as pure consumption strength.
With Brent briefly clearing $101/bbl in the second week of September before easing, airlines faced yet another month of unpredictable ATF costs, extending a pattern that has now run for most of the year. Carriers continued to rely on capacity discipline and selective route rationalisation as the primary near-term levers while the industry waits to see whether the late-September oil pullback holds into the festive travel season.
India’s office real estate market continued to be the sector’s steadiest performer through September’s market turbulence, with H1 2026 data from Cushman & Wakefield showing gross leasing of roughly 43 million square feet across the top markets — a 5% year-on-year increase driven by sustained Global Capability Centre expansion and an increasingly diversified occupier base. Earlier-year data from Knight Frank had already shown GCCs accounting for a record 48% share of total Q1 2026 leasing, with Mumbai and Hyderabad both recording historic highs; retail leasing told a similarly resilient story, with Q2 2026 gross leasing volume of 2.4 million square feet up 17.6% year-on-year despite continued supply constraints in prime markets. Flex space and the “Core + Flex” occupier strategy remained the dominant structural theme through the quarter, alongside continuing progress on green-certification penetration for new supply.
Residential sentiment continued to lag the office segment’s momentum through September, with the RBI’s fifth consecutive rate hold in August having already dampened any near-term expectation of cheaper mortgage financing, and the next policy signal not due until the October 5–7 MPC meeting. Developers and buyers in the premium segment largely maintained the holding pattern that has characterised much of the year, with the added uncertainty from September’s crude-and-currency volatility further tempering big-ticket discretionary purchase decisions. Most market participants continued to look to October’s policy announcement, alongside the start of the festive season, as the next meaningful catalyst for residential activity.
Tier-II/III cities continued to attract GCC satellite operations through the September quarter, extending a trend that has run through the first three quarters of 2026 largely independent of the near-term macro and geopolitical noise affecting equity markets — cost arbitrage and skilled-talent availability remain the primary drivers cited by developers and occupiers alike.
With the festive season historically the strongest window for residential sales in India, developers used September to finalise launch timing, incentive structures and subvention schemes for the October-November period, betting that a combination of festive sentiment and clarity from the RBI’s October MPC decision could unlock some of the pent-up premium-segment demand that has built through the year’s holding pattern.
The telecom sector’s defining story of September was Vodafone Idea’s long-awaited debt financing breakthrough. Reports on September 11 confirmed that a consortium led by State Bank of India — alongside Union Bank of India and the National Bank for Financing Infrastructure and Development — had agreed to provide roughly $3.5 billion in debt financing over a tenure of nearly ten years, with the funds earmarked to strengthen Vi’s network and improve its competitive footing against Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel. The financing comes with pointed conditions: Kumar Mangalam Birla must remain chairman for the full loan tenure, and the arrangement includes guarantees covering repayment in the event of default. SBI’s own sanction had reportedly been resolved in late August once promoter companies agreed to provide those guarantees, though full disbursement still awaits sign-off from private-sector lenders in the consortium — a condition the bankers involved have said is non-negotiable given the scale of the capex programme.
The financing news landed against a backdrop of genuinely improving fundamentals: Vodafone Idea’s Q1 FY27 (June quarter) results showed a consolidated net loss narrowing sharply to ₹3,754 crore from ₹6,608 crore a year earlier, revenue growing roughly 6% year-on-year to ₹11,689 crore, and ARPU climbing 10.2% year-on-year to ₹195 — evidence, management argued, that the government’s 2025 relief package (including converting roughly ₹37,000 crore of dues into equity and capping past spectrum payments) is translating into real balance-sheet repair. The stock has gained around 31% so far in 2026, sharply outperforming a Nifty 50 that has been roughly flat to down over the same period, pushing Vi’s market capitalisation to around ₹1.6 lakh crore. The industry-wide tariff hike that most brokerages have expected since late 2025 — with Morgan Stanley’s base case still a 16-20% increase across 4G/5G plans — remained formally unannounced through September, with operators continuing to lean on plan restructuring and bundled-benefit tweaks rather than a headline price move.
Ahead of full financing disbursement, Vodafone Idea had already initiated its network expansion capex with equipment orders placed with Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung, targeting a rollout pace of 3,000 to 3,500 new 4G sites monthly — a scale of ambition that, if sustained, would represent the most aggressive network build the operator has attempted since its 2018 merger.
Vodafone Idea’s bank debt had decreased sharply to ₹726 crore as of March 31, 2026, from ₹2,326 crore a year earlier — a deleveraging trend that industry analysts say materially improved lender confidence heading into the SBI-led consortium’s evaluation of the fresh term-loan proposal, alongside the government’s continuing equity conversion and spectrum-payment relief measures.
India’s kharif season has told two very different stories in 2026. June brought a rainfall deficit approaching 38% and a kharif sowing gap of 20.8% below the prior year as El Niño strengthened and farmers across rainfed regions delayed planting decisions; oilseed sowing alone had fallen nearly 40% year-on-year at the low point. July reversed much of that shortfall sharply, with active low-pressure systems narrowing the sowing gap to just 2.9% by month-end — but the recovery masked persistent regional deficits, with the cumulative all-India rainfall shortfall still running at 13% as of August 19, according to the Department of Economic Affairs’ latest review. The 111 high-risk districts flagged by the Agriculture Ministry earlier in the season — concentrated across Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Bihar, Jharkhand, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha — remained under close monitoring through September.
The critical development came in the IMD’s August 31 update, which stated plainly that “monthly rainfall over the country as a whole during September 2026 is most likely to be below normal,” with strong El Niño conditions prevailing over the equatorial Pacific and expected to strengthen further. INCOIS’s latest Special El Niño Outlook Bulletin assigns an 80-98% probability that El Niño remains the dominant ENSO phase from August 2026 through March 2027 — a duration that, if it holds, would place this among the longer El Niño episodes on record and extend the risk well into the rabi sowing season. The one meaningful offsetting factor IMD flagged is the Indian Ocean Dipole, currently neutral but with some international climate centres forecasting a shift toward positive territory from September onward, which could partially cushion the El Niño drag on rainfall — a genuinely uncertain variable that leaves the month’s final rainfall tally, and with it much of the kharif harvest outlook, still an open question as the monsoon season closes out.
If INCOIS’s central estimate holds and El Niño remains dominant through March 2027, the pattern’s influence would extend well past the kharif harvest and into rabi sowing decisions for wheat, mustard and other winter crops — a genuinely longer risk horizon than the sector has had to plan around in recent years, and one that is prompting insurers and state governments to extend their own monitoring and contingency-planning windows accordingly.
Brent’s brief return above $101/bbl in the second week of September fed through to renewed pressure on diesel costs for farm machinery and produce logistics, alongside natural-gas-linked fertiliser input costs, compounding the uncertainty already created by the below-normal rainfall outlook — a combination that has made this an unusually difficult season for agri-input companies and commodity traders to plan procurement around with confidence.
September delivered no meaningful de-escalation in the war that has now run for seven months. Fresh US-Iran strikes at the start of the month — the first direct exchange in roughly four weeks — reignited fears of a return to full-scale conflict, and by mid-month Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was reporting a supertanker, the EL GAIA, destroyed by naval mines while attempting to cross the Strait of Hormuz via what Tehran called a “forbidden route.” Iran also declared a new restricted maritime zone near Hormuz in the first week of the month, threatening to add any vessel it judged to be intending transit within the zone to its sanctions list, and maintained its list of 45 blacklisted tankers first published in late August. On the US side, the naval blockade reimposed in mid-July continued at scale, with 94 commercial vessels redirected, three disabled and two boarded for compliance by September 7 — a level of ongoing military-maritime enforcement that underscores just how far the conflict remains from resolution.
Against that backdrop, India delivered its most significant diplomatic achievement of the year: hosting the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi on September 12-13, an event senior officials including Defence Minister Rajnath Singh described as leaving “an indelible mark on the global stage.” The summit’s unanimous adoption of the New Delhi Declaration, China’s signalled support for India’s push for a permanent UN Security Council seat, and broad condemnation of cross-border terrorism were all framed domestically as evidence of India’s growing global standing even as the country continues to absorb direct economic costs from a war playing out just beyond its western maritime approaches. The scale of the summit’s security requirements was significant enough to force the postponement of the GST Council’s own September 12 meeting to October 7 — a reminder of how much bandwidth a summit of this size consumes even for a government simultaneously managing an ongoing regional conflict’s spillover effects.
Hosting both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping at Bharat Mandapam within days of a mined tanker sinking in the Gulf underscored the balancing act India’s foreign policy establishment has had to sustain throughout the year — maintaining energy and diplomatic ties across a fractured geopolitical landscape while continuing to absorb direct economic costs, including fourteen confirmed Indian deaths reported earlier in the conflict, from a war it has had no direct role in starting.
The declaration of a new restricted maritime zone extending from the line of the US naval blockade through the strait and into portions of the Persian Gulf — announced by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council secretary Mohsen Rezaei in the first week of September — represents a further hardening of Tehran’s posture rather than any softening, complicating the case for Indian shipping and energy interests that had hoped September might bring some relief after August’s relative lull.
The 57th GST Council meeting — originally notified for September 12, 2026, with an Officers’ Meeting the day before — was formally rescheduled to October 7 via an office memorandum from the GST Council Secretariat, with the preparatory Officers’ Meetings now set for October 5 and 6. The postponement was attributed directly to India’s hosting of the BRICS Leaders’ Summit on September 12-13, with the scale of security, protocol and administrative arrangements for a gathering of that size making it impracticable to convene both events concurrently. The delay pushes back a decision on some of the year’s most closely watched pending GST items, including the long-discussed inclusion of electricity and natural gas within the GST net — a move industry bodies estimate could unlock over ₹20,000 crore in input tax credit for energy-intensive manufacturers — alongside compliance simplification measures and further work on GSTAT dispute resolution mechanisms.
On the collections side, August delivered gross GST revenue of ₹1,99,853 crore, up 14.8% year-on-year from ₹1,74,116 crore in August 2025, though down from July’s record ₹2.11 lakh crore — a pattern industry watchers described as a normal month-on-month easing after an unusually strong July rather than a sign of underlying weakness. Domestic transaction revenue grew a more modest 9.3% to ₹1,37,249 crore, while import-related GST jumped 29% to ₹62,604 crore, a figure inflated in part by higher crude import valuations during the month’s price spikes. After refunds of ₹31,795 crore, net GST collections for August stood at roughly ₹1.68 lakh crore. Separately, the August 31 deadline for ITR-3 and ITR-4 filers — those with business or professional income, filing under the new staggered AY 2026-27 timeline introduced in Budget 2026 — passed without the kind of portal-congestion extensions that plagued the prior filing cycle, an early sign that the new staggered system is achieving its intended goal.
With the September meeting displaced, the six themes flagged as the 57th Council’s likely agenda — compensation cess transition, compliance simplification, ITC litigation reduction, electricity and natural gas inclusion, GSTAT dispute resolution, and possible amnesty and renewable-energy valuation measures — all now carry over to October, alongside whatever additional issues surface at the preparatory Officers’ Meetings on October 5-6.
The ITR-3/4 deadline’s relatively smooth passage on August 31, following July 31’s ITR-1/2 deadline, suggests the staggered filing system introduced in Budget 2026 is functioning as intended in reducing e-filing portal congestion — a meaningful improvement over the AY 2025-26 cycle, which required a CBDT extension to September 15 and further technical-glitch-driven relief.