To Dear Mr Finance Minister!!!

It’s the Budget season again…and every one has a guess on what PC might have in store this Feb 28^th. There is guesswork at play whether he will reduce the tax slab, move to EET for most tax exempt savings, increase the saving limits, reduce VAT on housing projects, waive off FBT, etc…

Let me not add to any guess work. On contrary I have some suggestions for PC – steps which will yield him much higher tax collections, and hopefully that can allow him to give some respite to a common man like me.

Some new taxes should be imposed on

• All film award shows. Come January, you have an award show being conducted every weekend – Filmfare, Screen, Zee, Gifa iffa, fifa rita sita geeta awards… Even television has N awards…HHITA, ekta kapoor shows awards, parivar awards, saas-bahu awards, Star Parivaar, Sony ka Parivaar… A simple “Award show Tax” should be imposed. AT at 40% of ticket collections, 5% of the show revenue and 5% of the revenue of the award winner. Hopefully, this will stop the me-too awards proliferating any further – and dissuade each Tom-Dick-Harry vying for them – and hopefully bring back some relevance and value to an ‘award’.
  
• Ekta Kapoor and ilk. Tax their earnings at an addition 10% for each instance of a ‘Mihir’ changing or a dead character reappearing. 20% extra levied on earnings each time a character is shown living beyond 100 years. 5% extra each time there is a mother who looks 10 years younger than her on-screen kids. All serials, TV shows, movies with names starting with a ‘K’ will be taxed at 50% - call it a ‘Ekta tax’. A 10% surcharge levied each time a serial takes a 10-20 year leap. A special tax rebate should however be offered on serials which close within 100 episodes (as spare the audience benefit)
  
• All Reality shows. 50% revenue from SMS’s votes/opinions/messages sent in. All SMS’s for give your opinion and vote – things which don’t count at all. The collections from this tax be given to TRAI for some cell-phone consumer welfare.
  
• India is a cricket sick country. We need some health insurance for people to recover from cricket mania. This can be generated by a cess on Crickets endorsement earning towards this fund. Any cricketer in ICC top 10 rankings get taxed only 10%. Cricketers in ICC 10-20 rankings will get taxed at 20% of their earnings… and so on with an 10% increment for each bracket. So, this would ensure that the cricketers strive more for excellence in the field than in the studios’… If they do, the cricket heart-breaks will reduce. If they don’t, there will be enough tax collections to fund the heart-break treatments.
  
• Tax MP’s at the %age of time they spent in parliament causing or being part of walkouts and ruckus. Parliamentarians who spent 100% time should have their earnings (white and black both) fully tax exempt. A tough one to implement.
  
• Have you ever taken a look at the cost of living in Bangalore…? Its as costly as any other metro… Yet the tax deduction rate for HRA is just 40% of HRA. This ought to be at par with the other metros. Hey this is a serious suggestion…!!!