An idea before its time

Instead of farm income tax, prune subsidies

It has long been argued that to widen the group of taxpayers, agricultural income should be brought into the tax net. Recently, a minor controversy erupted when at the time of the release of NITI Aayog’s three-year action plan, one of its members, Bibek Debroy, mentioned that this would be a wise course. Mr Debroy’s suggestion met with some swift disagreement, including from Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who said there was no plan at the moment to tax agricultural income. Even the vice-chairman of the NITI Aayog, Arvind Panagariya, said that given the plan to double farmers’ income, taxation of