With reference to Shekhar Gupta’s “The WhatsApp governance” (November 19), it is widely known that small businesses and industries and individuals who should be in the tax net based on their incomes have been avoiding paying taxes for ages by making most of their transactions in cash and successfully paying off officials assigned the impossible task of catching their many irregularities. Keeping national interest in mind, these sections have to be forced into the computerised, transparent and mostly cashless world through easy, foolproof procedures on the one hand and a rigid cash holding limit (say Rs 3 lakh for all) on the other.
The massive effort at getting the poor to open bank accounts and demonetisation are logical initial steps in this direction. But will our politicians agree to total transparency (including revealing the funding sources of their parties) and will our bureaucrats implement such policies without sabotaging them?
Alok Sarkar, Kolkata
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