Comments on: Merry Diwali, quoth the taxman

By: AD

AD — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 06:59:41 +0000

Indian Tax Rates are actually pretty low now. Top rate is 30%. We have enough indirect taxes, sales tax, luxury tax, octroi etc. so please no need for anymore.

AS to merchants charing the tax, depens from place to place. Id say probably pay it 60-70% of the time.

By: epoch

epoch — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 06:10:43 +0000

Fight bureaucracy with bureaucracy :-

1)Procure a farming license. (Difficult, except through nepotism.) 2)Buy some designated farm land, should be cheap due to government induced price controls. * 3)$$$ Profit. $$ Farm income in India is not taxed, so fake farms are good for both tax evasion and money laundering. **

For Step 2 some of the more smart-alecy mutineers may think of buying farmland near commercial areas, with the hope that it may someday be redesignated as commercial land and thus result in an increase in price. But since many people already do this, the farmland market near commerical areas is surprisingly efficient.

** Illegal. Indian prisions don't have the best human rights record. This post is satire, do not try it at home.

By: arZan

arZan — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 23:12:26 +0000

If this could be implemented as proposed, India's financial woes will be history very soon !!

Hope they have the political weight to pull this through.

By: DesiDancer

DesiDancer — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 22:56:38 +0000

but how many merchants actually charge/collect the taxes? **not being sarcastic or facetious– legitimate question, because I’m curious what others have seen or experienced.

By: hammer_sickel

hammer_sickel — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 21:35:17 +0000

Sales taxes are included with price of the product in India.

By: Ovaltine

Ovaltine — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 20:58:35 +0000

Mobile phone users who run up a bill in excess of 1,000 rupees ($22) a month can expect to receive a text message from the finance ministry to pay up.

Since the problem is so wide, how much is a txt message going to really do? Mostly likely people are going to just press delete. Unless of course they start really cracking down on people. But does the Indian gov really have resources to that?