India is glued to the TV when there are Cricket matches, election results and for the budget speech by the Finance Minister. While each one of us is an expert when it comes to Cricket with special comments and loads of advice for Indian Captains concerning all the departments of the game, elections come naturally to the \”argumentative Indian\”, the long winding acrimonious debates are the spice of pre and post election analysis, but when it comes to the budget, despite our focused attention most of us are clueless about the ramifications of this yearly ritual. But that by no means acts as a dampener and we religiously hear every word uttered by the \”Kubera\”, the mythological God of Wealth, our very own Finance Minister.
The Current and Fiscal account deficits, the FDI and FIIs GST are all terms which we keep hearing all the time but don\’t understand and yet we are all ears. The only major thing which interests a salaried middle class person is the Income Tax slabs, as that pinches directly, even after exhausting all possible tax saving options one ends up coughing out minimum three months equivalent of the annual gross pay package… that hurts and hurts bad. The indirect taxes also effect us but the impact is not felt immediately and is thus more subdued. There are expectations each year that this time the salaried middle class will get its due attention, the only class of people which are brutally honest tax compliant (they have no choice!), in an otherwise non tax compliant nation, as admitted by the man who controls the purse strings himself.
In the past there have been honest Finance ministers, Yashwant Sinha for example who did admit that \”middle class does not vote and hence they don\’t count for much\”, even though they contribute a lot by being the largest consumers thus driving the growth in the economy and of course filling up the empty coffers by the TDS ( Tax deducted at Source). In India we have been blessed with Finance Minsters who were as clueless as the general pubic is about finances, Charan Singh for example decided to put even bathing soaps in the luxury goods (!). But since Dr Manmohan Singh assumed the mantle as the Finance Minster in 1991 Narsimha Rao govt and bailed us out of the looming debt crisis, by and large the portfolio has been handled by more professional parliamentarians.
The other thing which interests most of us is the cost of daily use items, such as smartphones, refrigerators, TVs, cars and two wheelers, rail fare and so on.
Finance minsters or their babus have a knack of camouflaging taxes as surcharges and levies which somehow become a permanent fixture, at least I haven\’t heard of any of them being repealed once introduced. Despite all this jugglery the assets and liabilities are balanced rather precariously with the threat of Damocles sword of Fed rate hike or oil price hike omnipresent to leave things in a mess.
Our domestic finances on the contrary are pretty well managed with the purse strings strictly controlled by the ladies, with no profligacy and with adequate caution, we have been managing to sail through year after year for the three decades in my case and I am sure same is the case with most of us. I wonder why nobody has ever thought of this brilliant idea as yet, is the PM listening ;). He did listen probably and appointed Niramala ji, but things haven\’t improved much, I wonder!!! May be the RBI Governor or the Finance Secretary or both may be entrusted to them…then …….