-The Hindu Business Line The possible gain arising out of tax compliance has come at too high a human cost ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’ – Benjamin Disraeli After the RBI’s latest revelations — of 99 per cent of the extinguished currency having returned to the banks — media pundits and economists have wasted no time in saying that efforts to obliterate black money have failed. However,...

-Scroll.in Because the exercise was doomed to fail in its primary objective of rooting out black money, the government kept changing its aims. We have travelled a long way from November 8, 2016, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi told us that the black money held in Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes would become “worthless pieces of paper”. Now, we are told by the finance ministry that the government expected...

-Hindustan Times After Tamil Nadu’s pioneering Amma canteens, many states have started community kitchens, such as Karnataka’s Indira Canteens. This is a welcome development. The first coverage of the recently inaugurated “Indira canteens” in Karnataka that I noticed were two reports on television channels. Both were poking fun (justifiably) at Rahul Gandhi’s goofy speech at the launch. Sadly though, neither commented on the rationale or importance of the Karnataka government’s initiative. This...

-TheWire.in Instead of waiting for all the data to come in and making an apples-with-apples comparison, are different numbers being thrown at the public in order to make a political point about the ‘success’ of demonetisation? On August 18, the Ministry of Finance issued a clarification about the number of tax payers that had been added post-demonetisation, hoping to set at rest the confusion – and skepticism – that had resulted from...

-The Hindu Business Line Uses SFT to identify people who made high cash deposits during demonetisation period New Delhi: In hot pursuit of black-money hoarders who may have made high-value cash deposits during the demonetisation window, the Income Tax Department has identified an additional 6.6 lakh people in the second phase of Operation Clean Money. The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has harvested information from the Statement of Financial Transactions (SFT) to...