Making India Atmanirbhar - Simplify the Tax System to bring the Real ‘Ease of Doing Business’

Since Independence, India has seen many revolutions and took steps in the right direction to achieve the Self Reliance. These revolutions came when India was in the distress but the leadership chose to shun the old means to Achieve New Heights. In 1965, India did it with the Green Revolution making India self reliant in Wheat Production. In 1970, it was with the start of Operation flood, which made India World’s largest Milk Producer by 1998. In 1991, India ushered in the Economic reforms under the leadership of P.V. Narsimha Rao and Dr. Manmohan Singh, removing the older regime of protectionism and licence Raj and allowing Investments in the Country.

No Revolution has been caused by continuing on the same policies but by taking bold steps and adopting new ideas with clear goals.

Today India is standing at a very different path, eying an immense danger of Coronavirus continuing to spread in India with the immediate danger of collapse of economy. Till the time some vaccine is available for prevention of the virus, the virus will continue to disturb the business environment of the Country and the question arises, how will we able to save both the economy and lives together?

India today needs to think both on the short term and long term basis to ride over this tide and has to work swiftly to minimize the damage. While the measures being taken by the government to ease out the liquidity in the present scenario are welcome, it needs more to do for providing a long term impetus to ease the business environment in India besides upgrading its infrastructure both physical and legal to hold on to the economy from falling any further.

Even in the pre covid era, the steps taken by the Government may have helped certain category of business and on papers has improved the ‘Ease of doing business’ Rankings, they have failed to actually create the environment of investments and ease of doing business especially for the small and medium enterprises, where both the cost and time involved in doing the compliance has shot up exponentially.  And also the business enterprises both big and small have been dealing with frequent changes in compliance laws (including the retrospective amendments) that keep on coming after every short interval. GST in particular has been amended almost on the monthly basis since its inception and has created such a long list of litigation thus leaving a sword hanging on head of businessmen till the final disposal of the cases clearly defeating the main purpose of bringing in the simplification of tax laws.  

The Government must therefore look into core issues and take steps to address the business climate in India to boost the morale of the Businessmen and not just the cosmetic changes:

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