This was the healing touch the state coffers badly needed. A militant diktat 14 years ago—forbidding payment of taxes—had seen the Income Tax collections in Jammu & Kashmir drop to Rs 5 crore by 2000. But as a wind of hope blows through the state, people are defying threats, lining up to pay their dues. The collection for the last two years: Rs 230 crore.From just 7,000-odd two years ago, the base of income-tax payers in the Valley has swelled to around 30,000. These include politicians, who remain the biggest defaulters, private entrepreneurs and obviously state employees.However, the task of persuading people to pay taxes wasn’t mean, especially for a department that was literally non-existent in the Valley. It was in late 1989 that various militant organisations had issued warnings to the public forbidding them to pay taxes. Even payment of power and water tariff was banned.As its first target to mop up taxes, the I-T Department zeroed in on government employees, who at 1.7 lakh in Kashmir alone comprise a huge number. While their tax is supposed to be deducted at source, they would get away citing the militant threats. I-T officials roped in heads of departments, noted academics and doctors to talk to the employees about the benefits of paying tax.‘‘We discreetly held camps at key places and reasoned with them that it was a mistake to default and they were bound by law to pay tax,’’ says a top I-T official here. State employees account for 55 per cent of the tax collected in the past two years.The next target was the Valley’s businessmen, about whom information was gleaned from sales tax documents. I-T officials issued notices to private entrepreneurs to pay up Last year, the business fraternity added Rs 50 crore to the I-T kitty.The next group to be tackled by the I-T Department was Kashmir’s political class. The department dispatched notices to serving as well as former ministers and MLAs to declare their incomes and file returns. However, here the department met with marginal success, with ‘‘very few’’ paying up.With an exception. Officials say the one political leader who paid the tax was Muzaffar Hussain Beigh. Beigh, not surprisingly, needed no persuasion. He is J-K Finance Minister.
