3-7-15—a three year action agenda, recently presented by the Niti Aayog, together with the seven-year strategy and a 15 year vision that will be unrolled in due course, will transform India into a country where nearly everyone will have their own cars, air-conditioners, homes. Not just that clean air, decongested roads.
That is what the Niti(National Institution for Transforming India) Aayog vice chairman Arvind Panigariya who presented the action agenda, tells us will be the New India in 2031-32, ie 15 years hence..Together, the agenda, strategy and vision have replaced the 5-year plans that were hitherto the roadmap for India's growth. The 12th five year plan ended on March 31. From Rs 1.06 lakh in 2015-16 the per capital income is projected to Rs 3.14 lakh in 2031-32.
When Dr Panigariya said a vision document would follow, the immediate question that was raised was, how come an action agenda minus a vision. But vision, and a lofty one at that, seems to be there in every chapter of the agenda. The issue, is, how the vision will be realised.
There are chunks to deal with Modi's fight against corruption. The main among these is the idea of moderate taxation so that the generation of black money is halted, simple and transparent tax administration and reforms in the real estate sector. Another is the strengthening of special courts for speedy disposal of cases. Yet another significant suggestion is that the discretionary powers of government officials is reduced.
The action agenda reads like a PIB document where all the speeches, dreams, and promises of prime minister Narendra Modi, from the run up to the Lok Sabha polls in 2014 to his Man ki Baat of a few days ago have been strung together. In 300 points, the document touches a large part of our concerns, but as former minister Prof Yoginder Alagh points out in a piece critiquing the agenda, it does not demistify the nation on how exactly that transformation is going to happen.
He, like lesser mortals, does not see the Niti Aayog document as very clear in showing a road map. “To be fair, it is the job of a futures think tank to give us a perspective, But without details of how we get there, we are left like Oliver Twist, asking for more. Not more cars, but more details of how we get to that Nano”, he says.
“Since 2012, when the slide (in Index of Industrial Production) started, we are routinely told that the next quarter will be better, but now how. Of course, this does not mean that we should not have a vision for a better future. Just that the consolidation of the past can give us a foothold on the ground on which we will know how the future can be solidly constructed, brick by brick. But the Niti Aayog, giving us a vision, steadfastly refuses to construct the future”.
A couple of days after the action agenda was presented, Dr Panigariya was asked how job creation will pan out. He did not say what the action agenda does—that the problem is not of unemployment but underemployment, the problem is of three or four people doing the job that one person should, implying reduced productivity. The Niti Aayog vice chairman replied that it should not be left to the government to create jobs; industrialists, entrepreneurs and the private sector should address that!
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Taxing agricultural income is a very touchy idea in India. Politicians shy away from voicing such a thought. But finally, people in the right places are making the right noises. Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian has lately been asking why rich farmers should not be taxed. Niti Aayog member Dr Bibek Debroy is on record saying that the eventual answer to expanding the tax base is taxing the rural sector including agricultural income above a certain threshold.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitely had only recently brought the subject on to the table, as he pointed out that the Centre cannot, constitutionally, tax agricultural income, and so there was no plan to do that. The CEA was quick to point out that the state governments could. "The legal situation is nothing prevents state governments from taxing agricultural income. The constitutional restriction is on central government taxing agricultural income," he said.
In fact the exemption is dragging the government's revenues in other ways too. According to Debroy, “While only the agricultural income is exempt from taxation, their non-agricultural income also goes untaxed”
It is widely known that claiming agricultural income has been one of the ways of evading tax. People have bought cheap fallow land where not even a blade of grass can grow, land far removed from any source of water in dry land, and claimed to have earned an income. Of course with the connivance of revenue department's lower level staff. And thus, the colour of money has changed from black to white; even as a nation we have to turn blind to this .
Big zamindars known to be successful farmers, availing of many subsidised benefits to the farmers,agri processing and agro industries, have also been allowed to go tax free!
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How much of demonetised money has the RBI got? The government has remained mum on the quantum of the “black money” that it has unearthed in the course of the demonetisation as well as the primary sources. The answer to that question is something that the central bank governor Urjit Patel has not revealed to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on finances. What he said was the already known fact: As on November 8, there were 17,165 million notes of Rs 500 and 6,858 pieces of Rs 1,000 in circulation, aggregating Rs 15.44 lakh crore.
While the RBI Governor has managed to wriggle his way out of revealing that number the nation wants to know, he will be summoned again on May 25, when former prime minister Manmohan Singh, also a former RBI governor, may put pressure on Patel.
