Must abolish income-tax, says swamy
Senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and member of Parliament (MP) Dr Subramanian Swamy advocated the scrapping of unnecessary taxes and abolition of income-tax.
“We have got such complicated taxes that people don’t even know most of them. Income-tax should be abolished as it is the most unbalanced tax in this country,” he said while speaking at he World Hindu Economic Forum in Mumbai on Saturday.
Swamy said the country’s economic policies are “still not right and need corrective action”. He said the government needs to correct macro-economic policies. “Today, look at the potential of this country. Just a small change of abolishing quotas and licenses made India grow from a 3.5% growth rate to 8% in five years [1991-1996]. This can be done if we follow the right economic policies. Today, I am sorry to say, but we are not [following the right economic policies],” said Swamy.
He credited PM Narendra Modi for working hard on schemes such as Make In India and building toilets, which he said were micro-economic measures. “We need to now focus on macro-economic policies — and we are doing now,” he said. Even as the government has stopped hiking interest rates, these rates need to be reduced, Swamy said.
He said the way forward was to have a growth rate of 10% per annum. He added that India has always benefited from crises and a similar thing will happen now.