“Relief now would have gone to a handful of taxpayers”

TARUN BAJAJ, Revenue Secretary, Government of India, in an interaction with ANNURAG BATRA, Chairman & Editor-in-Chief, BW Businessworld, discusses the Union Budget, the long-term impact of the pandemic on growth, the $5 trillion economy goal, job creation, among other things. Edited excerpts

- ANNURAG BATRA

While the Union Budget was generally well-received, the middle class felt left out due to the lack of tax rebates. Are any changes in this regard expected in the future?

The world lives on hope. But let me explain some realities here. Out of 6.3 crore people who file returns, 75 per cent have income of Rs 5 lakh and below, and that number creeps up to 92 per cent if we consider income of Rs 10 lakh or less. When we talk of relief, it is those who have filed returns that are essentially asking for it. If you give relief of Rs 6 lakh, they will start showing income of that amount and would build capital without paying taxes to the government.

If we had announced relief, a very minuscule bracket of taxpaying citizens would have benefitted. This was not the right year to do that, though. We needed money to spend and focus on the people we had to spend it on. If you are giving free food to people, you are doing just that but if you are spending on MGNREGA, you are focusing on a particular class of people that require assistance. The idea was that instead of giving relief to a smaller percentage of people, we would rather collect the revenue and give relief to people via the expenditure route. While there are some areas we need to rectify, which will happen over time, it is distressing to know that even among people who should be paying taxes, a lot do not do so yet.

Can technology be utilised to address this problem? GST, for instance, has been around for so many years and working well…