Digital India - Tyranny of Tax

Narendra Modi government has made several references to the achievement of our people in the field of software. It is a clear indication that even before Narendra Modi became PM, Indians were doing good in the software domain and there is increasing computerization of activities of our day to day activities. In the urban areas we are seeing electronic ticket printers held by conductors, electric bills produced, debit card swipe machines for transactions, ATMs,  on-line entries for applications forms for many activities. All these look great for the visitor or a ordinary citizen as it makes the life easier.

The important things that is needed to live a life in a meaningful way to many is money and it is always in shortage. The shortage is not due to the inability of citizens to earn but the money taken back by the governments in the form of taxes and providing very little in return because of the huge corruption and brutal scandals over the period of time. The scale of scandals is mind boggling and we have become immune to lakh crore scams also. The greed of the rich and the poverty of the ordinary Indian form the two extreme ends of the richness scale. This is not only peculiar to India but to all nations civilized and barbaric.

The rich man after making a threshold limit of money, reinvests in many schemes and ventures and his net-worth keeps increasing. The banks happily fund these megalomaniac rich with little foresight and make huge NPAs which will become a burden on the poorest citizen of a given country. The government always loves money and it follows the money with utmost loyalty because money is the opium of politicians. Several schemes that are made and implemented are generally more beneficial to the rich than to the poor. The greed of the rich is clear in a simple case of the usage of subsidy by the super rich Indians. These rich don't want to pay the taxes on the wealth they have generated and force governments to give several different forms of tax concessions.

These rich businessmen and individuals make multi layered groups of companies and round trip the money to avoid the taxes and then go on to preach the poor about philanthropy. On the other hand the poor man doesn't have the luxury of reinvesting the money as he doesn't have any even to feed himself. What little money he has, parts of it will be lost in taxes put on each and every product he purchases and whether these taxes are given back to governments is highly doubtful. The ordinary poor man in the village and the richest man in the country shall have if god permits 2-4 meals a day and the tax component will be will be proportional. 

The definition of luxury is very important to understand because for the poorest person who has no opportunities and no skills has to fill his stomach and the richest man too has to fill his stomach. The scales of life style may vary but the basic needs should be fulfilled first for any living entity. The taxes on the most basic goods/services and prices should be put at the minimum keeping in mind the poorest citizen in this country. The luxury items which are consumed by the increasingly rich citizens should be increasingly taxed. It is here the tyranny of taxes becomes very visible. Two items will tell the entire story.

The governments have increasingly raised the taxes on the petroleum products which are used by the poor and rich without any distinction. The average indian too has to pay the same price on fuel as does the richest Indian. Two persons going to a factory one a office assistant and another a senior grade officer both coming on vehicles due to convenience with different levels of salaries have to buy the same product at the same cost. The one with lower salary will feel the pinch of taxes more than the one with the higher taxes. The other case is that of the farmers where the bigger and more connected farmers are usurping all the benefits of loan waivers while the small farmer is not getting the largesse of the state.

Why cannot the government which has rolled the Jan Dhan accounts also provide a PAN to every income generator citizen of this country. Once this is done the tax collection should be completely digital with the current tax payable should be available by sending a SMS instead of filing a set of forms declaring the several transactions. Any financial accountant will tell that there can be two types of transactions - Credits and Debits and sum total of credits and debits should be matching at the end, else there is a balance issues.

Every PAN should carry the following information
1.The money received to the concerned person from all sources and should be in two categories taxable and non taxable. The transferable between the bank accounts of the same individual should also be identifiable and treated accordingly.
2.The money paid by the person to various sources and should be categorized as general, non taxable. The general payments may be anything and the non taxable payments should include all the tax benefit scheme payments.
3.The tax to be paid or return that is available to be gained

To achieve this every transaction done by the individual through banks or other channels should be coded accordingly and every single paise in the system that is moving should have the source and destination declared. The various transactions should be linked to the Permanent Account of the tax payer. Just like we are seeing the bank balance we should be able to see the tax balances of the individuals. To achieve such a simple taxing system, the various financial arms should share information. This is the kind of digital india that an ordinary tax payer would expect which is transparent and not doing unnecessary clerical work about his expenditure and saving details.

The data should be generated once and it should be managed effectively. The entering the same data repeatedly is the most unproductive types of work that a tax payer is forced to do year after year and still we claim to be of some repute in software technology. I hope the government does something that is beneficial to the ordinary tax payer by using the data that is generated at its end.

Forgotten Lesson to Students - Failure, Compromise, Detachment

Every part of life a learning experience and life as a student is more interesting. It is because as a student, the primary duty is to learn, but serious questions arise since the learning curves go south as age progresses. As a child we tend to learn too many things and are very free to experiment without fear of failure, but as we age the fear of failure overpowers our desire to learn, experiment and experience. Apart from this fear, we also tend not to learn from others' experiences. The student life during adolescence is a dangerous mix of harmonies and rebellious ideas.

Children are becoming independent decision makers at a very young age and parents who are too concerned about their children are encouraging this trend. We are seeing more advertisements and marketing which are focussing on children as the decision makers. The question here is, whether a child is capable of taking decisions about issues that even a adult might not have a full knowledge. The children is in a safe cocoon given by his parents and elders and are taking certain decisions whose effect is not allowed to felt by the decision maker.

It is important to make a child to be made to understand the results of a particular decision and also to shield him so that he makes better decisions. The duty of the adult is to ensure that the child who has made a decision also bears the fruits of the decision and makes a learning. This part is most difficult as nobody wants rotten fruits. There is a strange case of nuclear families that we are seeing in the present world. In the so called bad old times, with a set of parents having 5-10 children, the children were not given luxuries, but an important lesson was taught. The lesson is about patience, sharing and making compromises for the sake of our siblings. This lesson is the most important of all.

But in the nuclear families, the child being the centre of family universe more often than not, the child if pampered a bit more than might have been necessary. There is no lesson about patience, sharing and making compromises and since a set of parents have to rise 0-4 children, there is more cash and resources available at hand. If there is intolerance on the streets and all around us, it must be due to the breakup of our societies and families into nuclear families and losing our ability to learn to adjust to others around us. Whether it is good or bad only time will tell in the long run.

In this scenario, if we tend to see the education system, we are finding that the governments have destroyed the quality of education for want of quantity. Many reports suggest that class  8 students are not able to do maths problem of class 3 and we are producing idiots with certificates. The schooling systems are such that no child is failed up to 10th because of a false concept that a failed student will lose his self esteem. The marks of students are changed in grades to avoid a few suicides of students due to poor marks.

Whether a student who cannot take failures can become successful? I strictly don't think so, and there is no correlation between the monetary success and the academic performance. We see world over the best entrepreneurs are not only highly educated and persons of high academic credentials but students who have been ordinary in their academics. Making money legally is a skill and so is taking and accepting failures in life. It is most important to tell children/students that success is a very rare element of life while failure is more common element and is more easily available in life.

Everyone wants to be successful in life and people tend to glorify the successful people in order to inspire other. But how often we talk and discuss about the struggles and mammoth efforts put in by these successful people. The education that a student should be given is to accept failures as a part of learning experience and solve the problems at hand objectively. the students should me made to learn and be detached from the problem and not take the failure of solving a problem as a personal failure. It is equally important to make one understand that monetary success is not everything but a essential part of life. The morals and ethics are equally important and living harmoniously with others who might be weak or strong is the most important.

UNAPOLOGETIC HINDU - RESETTING THE NARRATIVE - 3

The Christian god, Shri Jesus has been killed and the church later claimed and created myths to control the people and rule over the lands. The doctrines of the Church were one of the reasons for the slavery, as practised by the whites and their pseudo sense of superiority. But these whites have no shame when they come to India and preach Hindus of untouchability. The roots of untouchability in our society is not very clear and since we are ruled by foreign powers, the history we study and the societal changes that we see today might have been engineered. The engineering of the society is done to keep the society divided and rule over smaller fragments of the society.

The Hindus who are converted are called by many names, one such name is rice-bowl Christians. The Christians who claim equality in front of Jesus have several sects and one sect is in clash with the other. Recent the pope has bashed one evangelical group of poaching his faithful ones. The most powerful organized group, the Vatican is fearful of certain evangelical groups, then the unorganized Hindus should study the methods of these groups. The study should not be create differences and keep the flock together, but to understand the spread the truth about the religion that is being propagated. 

The Vatican itself claims that Mr.Thomas has never entered the Indian land, but a few control freaks of India continue the myth and display a dead body of Mr.Thomas. There are certain groups in the Christian community who say that this Mr.Thomas has committed atrocities on the natives of India and resulted in the conversion. These converted Christians are fighting a lonely battle against the powerful church, but the Hindus cleverly and foolishly distance themselves and stay in their own cocoons hoping that their families are safe. There is a myth that Shri Jesus has come back to India and settled in Kashmir in his last days, and there are a group of people in Kashmir who look after the tomb of Jesus.

The Christian religion is full of myths and false stories carefully constructed to wrest control from the natives. The Chruch has been responsible for the annihilation of the native people of several lands including America, Australia, etc. Every tribal group is carefully broken from their roots and then converted into Jesus followers, and this behaviour would shame Shri Jesus to no end. He would have never wanted bloodshed and he sacrificed himself for the greater good of his people. But the church leaders don't think so, and want to ensure that every human has to believe in Jesus so that Jesus will come back and give salvation. Hence in the name of Jesus there were several crusades conducted and people killed, murdered, tortured and human rights have gone into the black hole of religious barbarity.

With increase in immoral behaviour of the preachers, the once faithful westerners are slowly moving away from the church and are accepting some form of Hindu way of life. The Church is trying desperately and even claims that yoga is a path to reach Satan, while Jesus himself might have done yoga to get the enlightenment in the time his presence is not clear. Can Jesus be compared to the Krishna is a highly laughable question and in a desperate effort to get numbers in their fold, the church has been digesting several Hindu practices and giving a Christian flavour.

Hence in order to give a proper reply to the Vatican and its over enthusiastic evangelical, Hindu religious leaders should tell that Shri Jesus can be at best be a religious Guru and he got enlightenment. The story about Jesus travel to India should be spread along with the lack of philosophy in the Christianity. The Hindu religious gurus should dare to tell that there can be several ways to attain salvation and Christianity may also be one such method. It is the duty of the religious heads to bust the myths of Christianity for the greater good of humanity.