Where is the money draining?

Amused to see two incongruous news on the same page of Economic Times today

One was the move towards increase in taxes, the others was that of Mumbai under the crunch of poor infrastructure...

The professional tax levied in India is likely to be tripled from Rs.2500 per year to Rs.7500 this year. The professional tax is the 3rd largest contributor to the state tax kitty following the sales tax & VAT and the stamp duty (1). Where is all this tax money going…?

Is it funding urban development?
I think no…
Indian infrastructure is bleeding; a rain can overthrow the entire city into chaos, be it metros like Mumbai or Chennai or Tier-1 cities like Bangalore or Hyderabad or any other tier-2 cities like Coimbatore or Mysore.
One may argue about posh airports, flyovers or malls, but we need to concentrate on basic infrastructure such as sewage disposal and its treatment. Any flyover on a busy road in Bangalore takes 2-4 years to complete.

It funds rural development during political elections. The results are no good either.

I am putting across road infrastructure for example. We are under funding our every other system such as education, transport, agriculture and the like. And we are overtaxing our bonafide tax payers

Where is our money draining?

It is time to hone our financial management policies rather than hiking the taxes

Thoughts based on the news(1) from Economic times ‘Professional Tax may Pinch you more’ published in India

More thoughts and comments are welcome

The wrestler...

I come across this sight at least once in a week and more than once during exam season. This is common among engineering students in Bangalore. Two college kids on a bike, one busy wrestling the traffic and the other wrestling with a set of equations and diagrams scribbled on a sheet of paper. Occasionally the guy at the handle meddles into the equations and then goes back to the road… Always the equation wrestler seems to run at full MIPS (As we indicate a micro-processor performance in Millions of Instructions Per Second), storing the unprocessed RAW data. In most cases the traffic wrestler is a boy and the equation wrestler is a girl. The current trend in India is that you need to and will get into IT industry irrespective of your engineering major. The real wrestling starts if they go in for a job breaking this trend and this is rare.

Debate...for what?

I got an opportunity to watch a debate program in a leading Tamil TV channel. The debate happens between two groups of people moderated by one person. I really got an opportunity to see how ignorant and arrogant the people are. A girl in her early teen was talking about the pitfalls of the Indian marriages and the marriage custom, I wondered how many marriages she had before to arrive at that viewpoint! I simply walked away from the TV room and switched off my brain to a good piece of music. You encounter such people in our day-to-day life and you can’t avoid them. You have got to isolate and have fun. And the program might be a commercial success but it is a flop when it comes to the intellectual or entertainment content.