Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday asked States to consider waiving mandi taxes, octroi and local taxes for taming inflation, which affected the poor “harder” and posed a serious threat to the country's growth momentum. He said much of the responsibility for checking price rise lay with the States. “Much of what needs to be done... lies in the domain of State governments... There seems to be a strong case for waiving...

It is tragic that the same government that gives huge corporate concessions and loses money in corruption is fighting over minimum wages. As India's — and by some reckoning the world's — largest rights-based rural safety net programme completes five years, here is a reality check. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) has become the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). But in a monumental affront to the...

The public interest outweighs private interest and even assuming that there are some so-called private conversations in the Niira Radia tapes, their publication could not be challenged, Outlook magazine told the Supreme Court on Wednesday. In its response to the notice on industrialist Ratan Tata's petition questioning the publication of the tapes on the ground that his right to privacy had been violated, the magazine said: “There are no conversations that...

Four-pronged approach to understand compliance issues from taxpayers' perspective Challenge is to develop focussed programmes to reduce compliance costs Seeking to tackle the issue of black money in a proactive manner, the Finance Ministry has set up a “study group” to improve voluntary compliance and address the issue of revenue leakage by suggesting appropriate measures to motivate tax evaders to disclose their unaccounted income. The decision comes in the backdrop of Finance Minister...

The class bias in government policy is clear in the decision to release a small amount of foodgrain in the open market to tackle inflation. MOST people would agree that there is a strong element of speculation underlying the current inflation and that forward trading contributes to it. Yet the government, though it has banned forward trading in certain commodities under public pressure, is curiously reluctant to see this point....