Letters: Budget expectations

The middle class has huge expectations about income tax (IT) relief in the Budget that will be presented by the National Democratic Alliance government. Apart from an increase in the exemption limit, people will be looking forward to a higher interest exemption for housing loans for self-occupied owners, an increase in standard deduction and greater relief to senior citizens and so on.

Currently, employees are required to provide bills for their petrol, newspaper, telephone and medical expenses. This involves a huge amount of paperwork. Also, the submission of 15G and 15H forms to banks who receive more than Rs 10,000 a year interest on deposits not only consumes a lot of stationery and manual work for the banks, but also appears useless at the IT office, since millions of declarations are received from banks, perhaps only to be dumped in record rooms. Either the declarations should be dispensed with or only be obtained from depositors who receive interest of more than Rs 1 lakh a year.

B G Rao, Bangalore

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