Piketty presses India to publish I-T data of all years

Indian government should come out with income distribution data for years before 2012-13 for a meaningful assessment of income inequality in the country, noted French economist Thomas Piketty said.
Piketty, who gained global fame for his book 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' on wealth and income inequalities in Europe and the US, also emphasised that Indian media should put pressure on the government to provide the data.
"I will do my best to exploit the new data for 2012-13 in order to come with some new estimates of Indian income inequality in the coming months. However, I should stress that it is going to be very difficult to produce reliable conclusions with only one year of data," Piketty told PTI.

"The previous income tax tabulations series ended in 1998-99, so this leaves us with a gap of almost 15 years, during which so much has changed in India. It is odd that the Indian tax administration did not keep anything in electronic format for this entire period," he added.
The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) on August 19 had placed a new version of the income distribution data for assessment year (AY) 2012-13.
According to the data, 14 lakh people or just 4.6 per cent of the total assessees paid taxes in the highest 30 per cent tax bracket. There are 2.89 crore assessees in the country.

In a panel discussion at the Jaipur Literature Festival earlier this year, Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian who sparred with Piketty, had blamed past governments for non-availability of tax data, and had assured that the present government was working to fix it.