Before Narendra Modi replied with the now-famous greeting of “Puducherry ko Vanakkam”, a BJP worker was telling him in a party-organised video conference that the government was “only busy collecting tax in all manner and in all ways,”, creating much discomfort to the middle class. But a single-minded focus on taxes may not be a bad idea after all. The government has been relentlessly at work to increase its revenues, so that it has more money on hand to spend – be it on infrastructure or on welfare spending. That is why the two biggest, boldest decisions on the economic front – demonetisation and GST – both relate to taxes. Here is a third bold idea: tax agriculture.

Middle-class people, mostly salaried folks, have long felt that they have been bearing too great a burden of earning for the nation-building. A small upper class always finds ways to dodge taxes, and the larger lower middle class is rightly out of the tax net. Thus, direct taxes are paid by about six crore (or less: not all returns filed result in actual taxes). You could be earning barely Rs 3 lakh, and yet you have to cough up taxes. On top of that, the middle class, as consumers, also ends up paying up a large share of indirect taxes, be it various kinds of cess or the passed-on duties. 

Think

If India wants raise the tax-GDP ratio from about 16 percent to 22 percent, as NITI Aayog envisions, new tax options will have to be explored

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The top one percent farmers earn several times more than an average salaried taxpayer