Punjab's Professional Tax: An Avoidable Impulsive Proposition

Recently, Punjab’s Finance Minister, Manpreet Badal presented his second Budget, which primarily focused on fiscal consolidation, i.e., mobilising resources and cutting down expenditure.

- R. S. Bawa and Rajiv Khosla

Although the Budget tried to please all the stakeholders, it remains to be seen whether it can do so convincingly. In the mad race to amass resources to get cheaper loans from institutions like Asian Development Bank, Badal proposed a new tax of ₹200 per month on each tax payer and the modalities of this new tax are presently being worked upon. The state is already fund-starved and the outstanding debt is further projected to shoot up from ₹1.96 lakh crore in 2017-18 to ₹2.11 lakh crore in 2018-19. However, this direction of mobilizing funds by squeezing the tax payers cannot be justified.