Special 42800

Who said innovation is dead in India? After listening to the Honourable Finance Minister lay out the Union budget, I marvelled at the out-of-the-box thinking. Who could have thought of an all women’s bank to solve the gender issues in our country?

The other thing that I realized after listening to the budget speech was that our development must truly be all encompassing and has ensured fair distribution of wealth. As per IT records, only 42,800 individuals have declared an income greater than 1 crore and that is the SuperRich subset on which he plans to levy a tax surcharge. Again – it’s only for the next one year, says the ever considerate FM. If I take the average income of these HNIs as 5 crores (it includes our rich cricketers and filmstars), that accounts only for 5% of our nation’s GDP of a trillion dollars. That means the rest of the wealth is with the balance population and so all is well in our country. UPA should win the next poll hands down! This statistic will be a strong contender for the 1^st prize in Ripley’s Believe it or Not series.

The most prudent FM we had was the very same PC in his 1997 avatar who introduced the VDIS scheme. The tagline was “30% tax, 100% peace of mind”.  It allowed all the individuals and corporates who were hiding their income to pay 30% tax and get immunity from the IT Act and Foreign Exchange Act. 3 lac+ made use of this and the government mopped up 7800 crores. 

Why should we subject our “poor” tax evaders to any kind of mental anguish? The government should become practical and announce a VDIS scheme every year. To show an improvement on VDIS 1997, they should announce a "Door to door service" like our pizza chains. The collection agents will have to come with large suitcases to collect the tax (most of it I presume will be paid in cash). VIP and Samsonite must be smiling at their future business prospects. Through this innovative scheme at least the government’s fiscal deficit will come down. We can then also make a legitimate claim to shift the world headquarters of Amnesty International to New Delhi!