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(Submitted to the UPA-Left Coordination Committee
Meeting On January 12, 2006)
Successive governments in India have lacked the vision
or the political will to recognize that for adopting
a broad-based and effective pro-poor programme as well
as finance its development, it must shift its fiscal
policy in a direction that is geared towards taxing
the rich effectively in order to generate more tax revenues
and a high tax-GDP ratio. In fact, the trend has been
to the contrary: the rich have received several tax
concessions. The capital market, the corporate sector
and the new service sectors have also received unduly
large concessions in the name of growth and development
goals, but have actually contributed relatively little
in terms of real sector widespread growth and, more
importantly, broad based employment generation. Despite
the adoption of the Common Minimum Programme (CMP) by
the current UPA government, which is a mutually agreed
upon set of policy prescriptions between the ruling
coalition and its left allies (who are lending support
from outside) that includes specific provisions for
a revision of the tax regime, the actual policy scenario
has seen a continuation of the previous trends. This
note outlines the specific demands for an alternative
resource mobilization strategy which has been put forward
by the combined left parties in India. |
