<b>Ramakrishnan T S</b>: A conservative estimation of tax revenue

That has been the signature item of Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's Budgets

When the finance minister (FM) revealed the tax collections data of the first three quarters of FY 2016-17 in the second week of January 2017, questions were raised about the authenticity of the data by some quarters, including Mohan Guruswamy, chairman, Centre for Policy Alternatives, stating that all these figures were guesstimates. It is easy to check whether the claims made by the FM are real or guesstimates, with the revised tax collections available for FY 2016-17 in the Budget presented on February 1.
 
Table 1 compares the growth in tax revenues at different time periods to measure the