The Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council is scheduled to meet on December 18 to take stock of the issues that are affecting collections. The Centre's total GST mop-up so far this fiscal is around Rs 3.26 lakh crore, which is less than 50 percent of the budget estimate.

The council is likely to focus on rate rationalisation and corrections in the slab structure to give GST revenues a fillip. CNBC-TV18 spoke with tax expert Rohan Shah and Partner - GST at Deloitte India MS Mani to know their views.

Says Shah: "I have consistently been saying that you cannot take these shortfalls which are on account of economic factors not being buoyant and attribute them to evasion, I think that is a recipe for disaster. To my mind, the heart of this is that the sentiment is extremely low and people are just fearful of more changes. So, they will be well advised to look at building confidence and giving up sustained predictable path. I think more changes certainly isn't the way forward."

According to Mani, an amnesty scheme or an extension of dates would be a welcome step as businesses which are grappling with a slowdown may not have had time to go ahead with the GST compliance. The collections have slowed down because the underlying numbers of the GDP have slowed down. Therefore the way out may not be to start changing the rate slabs or anything of that kind," he noted.