A day after the Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC) said finance minister Pranab Mukherjee was considering an increase in excise duty on diesel cars, a consensus seems to be building within the government, with the oil ministry supporting the move. Following this, key stakeholders involved in taking a decision on increasing excise duty on diesel vehicles are likely to meet on Wednesday, according to three people, including a top...
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The austerity of the affluent-P Sainath
A rural Indian spending Rs. 22.50 a day would not be considered poor by a Planning Commission whose Deputy Chairman's foreign trips between May and October last year cost a daily average of Rs. 2.02 lakh Pranab Mukherjee's stirring call for austerity tugs at the national tear ducts. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has pleaded for it in the past and watched his flock embrace it creatively. With the Finance Ministry even...
More »Govt’s bid to widen tax base comes unstuck-Rajeev Deshpande
The government's efforts to widen the tax base are not paying off. New tax payers added over the past three years show a decline, while a staggering 89% of existing assessees are bunched in the lowest income bracket of Rs 5 lakh or less a year. Numbers point to a worrying trend the government would want to reverse as while 17,84,709 assessees were added in 2008-09, the figure slid to 16,75,069...
More »Once Again without Credibility
-Economic and Political Weekly Budget 2012, built yet again at the altar of fiscal fundamentalism, will not convince anybody. In this era of immediate assessment it took just a few minutes for the Union Budget for 2012-13 to be given one or the other negative appellation – “lacklustre”, “anti-growth”, “back to the 1980s”, “without reform” and the like. Such evaluations forget that union budgets have long since ceased to be statements of...
More »To fix BPL, nix CPL-P Sainath
To get the Below Poverty Line figures in perspective, we need to closely monitor the numbers driving the Corporate Plunder Line. One Tendulkar makes the big scores. The other wrecks the averages. The Planning Commission clearly prefers Suresh to Sachin. Using Professor Tendulkar's methodology, it declares that there's been another massive fall in poverty. Yes, another (“more dramatic in the rural areas”). “Record Fall in Poverty” reads one headline. The record...
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