I came across a BBC article titled Ten laws that India should scrap. In the section about salt taxes, it first states:
In 2013-14 collections from the tax amounted to $538,000 (£343,400), which was nearly half the cost of collecting it.
and follows this with:
A High Level Salt Enquiry Committee set up in 1978 recommended that the tax should be scrapped since the "annual collection was very small" while the total cost of collecting it was more than half of the total collection.
Am I mistaken in thinking that the first quote implies that the revenue from the tax was almost half the cost of the tax, while the second quote implies the opposite?
EDIT: I'm including the relevant part of the article here as a screenshot, as well as an Internet Archive copy of the BBC article.