India Tax Payer

  January 26th was the Customs Day. Four years back I was invited to the celebrations in Coimbatore. For the last few years, I do not find myself, getting invited! Maybe, because I 'pay' much lesser taxes and duties these days. Well, I wanted to draw your attention to the message given by our FM, Mrs Nirmal Sitharaman on this day  at New Delhi, this year. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/policy/work-focus-of-indian-customs-shifted-to-trade-facilitation-fm-nirmala-sitharaman/articleshow/80480576.cms See the report in the Economic Times the next day (27th). The ideas and the thoughts are absolutely lofty. Yes, Customs should become 'people' friendly and do 'business and trade facilitation' from now onwards. And that the Customs is going through a 'transformative process' and become more 'people centric'. I could not but help recollecting a similar lofty statement made by the then FM, Yaswant Sinha, in the year 1998 when he took ove

   India Budget 2021-22 is 'unprecedented'! Every budget has its own share of surprises and tough situations that they have all tried to stall. On a birds eye view of the budget, this has some new things that we could be happy about. On one side, this is more an income expense statement for the upcoming year, which is what budgets are supposed to be. For the last few decades, budgets have become policy announcing platforms. Budgets are supposed to be a plan for income and expense. I think, with this budget the FM is reclaiming that position for budgets. But for the two non-finance approvals that also went through with the finance bill, there is nothing to complain about. Having said that, budgets should mostly talk of allocation of funds for different spheres of social life in this country. Defence, health care, education, etc., Of course, health care takes in a large increase in allocation thanks to Covid situation and its immunisation scheme. But what happens with education a