The two out of four rule announced by finance minister P Chidambaram in the budget is likely to keep enforcement agencies on their toes. Stated briefly, the government proposes to treat citizens who do not have a source of income as income tax payees if they own two out of four of the following "" a four-wheel vehicle, a house or certain other categories of fixed assets in any metropolis, or have a telephone, or if they have travelled abroad in the previous year.
Stretching a point, it is possible under these provisions for a 21-year-old student who has won a scholarship abroad for three months, and who has a telephone connection subsidised by his parents, to be asked to pay income tax to the government the following year.
That is if, and only if, the government has the time to catch up with small fry. Before they can bring more tax payers into the net, the government is going to have to rev up its information databases considerably.
Consider this: at last count, the four metros plus Bangalore stacked up a staggering 0.75 crore motor vehicles between them. Two out of the four metros "" Calcutta and Mumbai "" have more vehicles running per km of road than either Hong Kong or Singapore.
The Central Road Research Institute, which is computerised, keeps records of the increase in number of vehicles but not the names of the owners. The Motor Vehicles Bureau is partially computerised "" its records of owners names spans from mid-1994 to the present date. People who bought, sold, and transferred their vehicles before that date have also been duly logged. The filing cabinets that contain their records are spread out through several offices.
In Delhi alone, the enforcers of the law could face a fairly serious problem. It is relatively easy to procure a list of subscribers from MTNL, or a list of house owners from the Municipal Corporation and other sources. When it comes to motor vehicles, though, consider this: by December 1996, the number of motor vehicle owners in Delhi had crossed the 2.5 million mark, while the capital had a total population of 10.6 million. That effectively f orces the administration to examine the records of roughly 24 per cent of the population!
