Chief Statistician of India T.C.A. Anant on Friday said the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime will provide a much richer database than the tax database of the states and the central government."The GST is much richer database than the tax database of the Centre as well as states, because it simply integrates the two," he said at an interactive session organised by the Bharat Chamber of Commerce.The GST, by design, not only talks about the tax liability of enterprises but also about how they connect to each other and the GST database inherently captures the transactional framework, according to him."We will need to examine it carefully. It is too early to say what form it will take. If we have a database which captures transactional framework, its implication for GDP measurements are huge," Anant said.Describing the implementation of GST from the data point of view as an "exciting development", he said going ahead, implications of GST for India's national account compilation would be quite large. He said businesses would have to bear one-time transitional cost at least for the first year of the implementation of the new indirect tax regime.Responding to a query that the GST is complicated, he asked: "Is it more complicated than what we have now? It may not be the ideal which people would have wanted. Policy is about what is pragmatically feasible."He said the GST was an improvement over the present indirect tax structure and it would get simpler as we go along.