The TDS (tax deducted at source) collections of Income tax (I-T) department touched a new high at Rs 5,657 crore at the start of the current fiscal year, an increase of Rs 887 crore from the last year. The highest TDS collections came in from the state government employees which stood at Rs 437 crore.

TDS is one of the modes of collection of taxes, by which a certain percentage of amounts are deducted by a person at the time of making/crediting certain specific nature of payment to the other person and deducted amount is remitted to the government account.

I-T officials attribute the record collection to the strict approach with which they went on for collections and also tightening the grip on regular defaulters. "In case of the state government employees' salary, the concerned officials used to deposit TDS after the fiscal year began because of which it used to show only in next year's collections. This year we made sure it was deposited before the fiscal year began," said an I-T official.

Last year an amendment was brought where in if the TDS was not deposited in time, the amount would be deducted from the salary of drawing-cum-disbursing officer in the government. This is also one of the reasons that collections crossed Rs 5,000 crore this year.

TDS is mandatory on various income sources such as salary, interest, rent, commission, professional fees and lottery earnings. TDS also helps avoid tax evasion by making it compulsory for the payer to first deduct and then pay. I-T officials also collected Rs 33 crore from 208 defaulters in the 2013-14, almost double than 2012-13 when it collected Rs 17 crore from 60 defaulters.

Earlier this year, as many as 13 people from the state paid Rs 1 crore or more as advance tax including cricketers Ravindra Jadeja and Irfan Pathan.