India gets its new minority:

Do you pay to be a minority?
Picture courtesy: national.deseretnews.com

Our Income tax department is a very nice place, once in a year, they work when the fiscal calendar ends and that too they are not sweating because of workload. Here’s why:

India’s income tax department, which was disowned by our beloved Delhi CM, Arvind Kejriwal (beloved? Seriously Mrigank!), recently came up with a report providing the glimpse of how India fared in filing income tax for the year 2012-13 (half a decade too late Sir).

According to the reports, India can now officially have a new minority which can fight for quota rights in school, colleges, and public and private jobs. Since I am writing this article, I want to coin a term for them…hmmm…It’s tough, okay for the time being let’s call them-”Tax Trolled”. I tell you the reason why?

The report, which I could understand through my knowledge, states that in the population of 125 crores people, around 2.87 crores people filed the income tax returns for the year 2012-13, which amounted to Rs. 1,14,550 crores of rupees approximately i.e. approximately 2.3 percent people actually filled ITR (Phew! It’s such a huge number). But that’s just filing the income tax returns, the actual taxpayers were just 1.25 crores (I have taught you a lot, please do the calculations yourself).

Okay, I know how poor India is, even I have seen Slumdog millionaire. I accept, that India has a major chunk of the population in agriculture and hence exempted from taxes (Even most of our ministers are farmers). I also admit that there is a population who earns less than Rs. 2.5 lakh per annum and hence exempted from tax, which also proves how bad money distribution in India is and how poor our population is.

So if I remove this major chunk out of our country’s population, where is the rest of money? It is circling in the “Black Zone” or what our favourite Yoga Guru Baba Ramdev says “Kaala Dhan”. Hence, a tremendous amount of black money is circulating in India which is “exempted” from tax.

India has long list taxpayers: Salaried, house owners, business person, long term investors, short-term investors, other sourced incomes, interest earners. For people who are earning, they have different slabs for income tax- 10, 20 and 30 percent depending upon the income they earn and for other taxpayers, there are specific slabs to accrue taxes.

Let’s do some mathematics and see who pays what amount of taxes (Oh gosh! I hate doing this):

Income category	Tax accrued (in Rs. Crores)
Salary	6,27,200
House/property	29,927
Business	4,03,251
Long term gains	30,479
Short term gains	3,290
Other sources	1,28,020
Interests	44,918
Total income Tax	12,67,085
Total tax accrued	1,14,555
Population	125
Effective rate of IT	9%

Which is actually less than the lowest slab of 10% percent too. So I guess, you got the picture the amount of work done by IT department (Pun) and the reason people should ask for minority quota as people like us pay taxes and what benefits we get which others who don’t pay taxes don’t. Though it’s just one year report and hence can’t say where it is going, but seeing this it is clear that something is wrong. I don’t want to instill hatred among people, but it’s something people should ask where are the actual benefits for us, why they get grants while we still pay full fees, why they get priority in hospital while we pay exorbitant amount of money for private hospitals, why they enjoy quota or not even non-creamy layer while we still fight for that one last seat of our dream schools or colleges. 

I applaud the income tax department for bringing out this report and making things transparent. But I request everyone to pay taxes or else tell the government to stop collecting taxes from people; it’s a waste of time for taxpayers, IT department and certainly those who don’t want to pay taxes.

Till then #DiscoverTransparency, #DiscoverTruth and #DiscoverNewInYou with me here at: My Blog