KEY TRENDS • Oxfam India's 2023 India Supplement report on poverty and inequality in India reveals that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Following the pandemic in 2019, the bottom 50 per cent of the population have continued to see their wealth chipped away. By 2020, their income share was estimated to have fallen to only 13 per cent of the national income and have less than 3...
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How GST is killing small businesses with inspector raj and suffocating compliance -Ritesh Kumar Singh
-ThePrint.in GST was supposed to create a unified market. The opposite is happening with small businesses being harassed with invoice and payments. The introduction of the Goods and Services Tax or GST was supposed to create a unified market of 1.4 billion people and encourage entrepreneurship and job creation. The other aim was to bring more and more firms into the formal sector of India’s economy, which will help expand the tax...
More »Healthcare Budget Allocation Low As It's States' Responsibility: Finance Secretary
-PTI/ NDTV Finance secretary T V Somanathan on Monday said healthcare is primarily the responsibility of the states Mumbai: Finance secretary TV Somanathan on Monday said healthcare is primarily the responsibility of the states, amid suggestions by the industry that the budgetary allocation for the sector is still low at 1.3 per cent of GDP. At a post-budget interaction of industry representatives in Mumbai with finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Confederation of Indian Industry...
More »Tarun Bajaj, Revenue Secretary at the Ministry of Finance, interviewed by Vikas Dhoot (The Hindu)
-The Hindu It would be much easier for the government to provide relief to people if the tax base was wider, says Revenue Secretary Tarun Bajaj, noting that four crore people don’t file returns though the tax department gets some TDS collections on their account. With major customs duty rationalisation done and corporate tax settled, the government hopes to finish some pending reforms in personal income tax and GST, creating a...
More »Are we overestimating the fiscal boost to the economy? -Roshan Kishore
-Hindustan Times Gross domestic product (GDP) statistics are released at both current and constant prices. The latter discounts inflation (more on this later) from the base year of the current GDP series. Let’s assume it takes a tonne of steel to build half a kilometre of road. Let’s also assume steel costs ₹1,000 a tonne and there is a tax of 10% on steel. Now, if steel prices doubled in a year,...
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