Gadkari’s way

The most extraordinary claims are being made by interested parties these days. Salman Khurshid of the Congress claims that Sonia Gandhi is the mother of the nation. The Aam Aadmi Party claims that Arvind Kejriwal’s temperature shot up just when he was to travel to Ralegan Siddhi to be by the side of his fasting former mentor Anna Hazare. But Gadkari takes the cake,claiming that tax collections could be doubled by eliminating income tax,sales tax and excise,and taxing transactions or expenditure instead. This is an attempt to overstep the UPA’s proposed Direct Taxes Code,but something a little less radical would have worked better. At this point,casting the direct tax net much wider while slightly reducing the individual tax burden looks like an idea whose time has come. Throwing the net away is not a persuasive strategy,given the mounting deficits that lie ahead.

The vision document’s proposal to do away with Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes in the interest of transparency is even more mystifying. An Indira-era cure for a Manmohan-era disease? In the meantime,methods of moving money illegally have become as creatively dodgy as derivatives of derivatives. Anyway,Harshad Mehta claimed to have got bang for the buck with just one suitcase,without the help of a single Rs 1,000 note. The big note had been demonetised by Indira Gandhi in 1978 and was reintroduced in 2001,a year after his death. Size doesn’t matter in the trickster’s game. All it takes is a spot of confidence.