In a first, CBDT has made public a host of hard data on the total number of taxpayers in the country, income disclosed in IT returns by various category of taxpayers and number of PAN holders in the country for a chosen period of time.

The department said the objective of publishing these statistics was to encourage "wider use and analysis of Income Tax data by departmental personnel and academicians."

Under the 'time series' data, between 2000-01 to 2014-15 financial years, discloses the actual direct taxes collection made by the department, direct tax to GDP ratio, the cost of collecting the revenue for the government kitty, number of effective assesses and workload and disposal of IT cases.

The department has also published statistics filed by taxpayers in their return of income for Assessment year 2012-13.

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It also discloses the Permanent Account Number (PAN) allocation across various categories and gender by the end of 2013-14 fiscal.

"A total of 84 page data has been released and put in the public domain for the first time. A number of economists and researchers had demanded that such data should be made available publicly and hence it has been uploaded on the official web portal of the department," a senior official said.