Gain knowledge till money comes your way!

It is Dipawali time.  Today is the festival of Dhanteras - the festival of money itself.  So one can be pardoned for daydreaming of money on this auspicious day.  And you can hardly think of money these days without a figure of xx lakh crores of INR clouding your thinking.  XX unfortunately is a variable and takes on any value from 02 to 70 depending on whom you chose to trust.  Also it must be changing with time. But now there has been a sudden and substantial markup.  Recently some leaders have proclaimed that if whole of the black money stashed overseas by some of our fellow countrymen were to come back to India and get divided equally amongst citizens, each one would be richer by INR 15 lakhs!  Let us take the country's population as 1.2 billion.  Though I personally suspect that this figure doesn't include another half a billion who have spilled over to numerous other countries.  But even if we ignore these runaways, simple arithmetic shows that the total quantum of money stashed overseas is 1800 lakh crores, or 18 crore crores, or, for the westernized, 1.8 million billion!  And this puts the value of xx at 1800!!  It makes your head spin.  In any case, it does make mine spin.

So let us get down to something that we poor citizens can better handle.  And that is the figure of 15 lakhs of INR that is coming our way, or is it?  There are a few questions that immediately spring up and keep you from enjoying the thoughts of the bounty.  These are:

1. Will this amount be taxable in the hands of the recipient?
2. If the answer to 1 is yes, then 
1. will the whole of it be taxed at current rates, or, 
2. will the tax be calculated from the year of independence till current financial year as the aforesaid 1800 lakh crore was generated over this entire period?  
3. If the answer to 2.2 is yes, what will be the interest payable on demands from earlier year?  I suspect that at currently stipulated interest rate we will not only end up paying the whole of 15 lakhs but will also have some arrears to pay.

So unless a specific exemption clause is enacted in the Income Tax Act for exempting this sudden windfall gain, the citizens are going to end up poorer after receiving 1.5 million INR each!

Yet another issue that keeps on disrupting my daydream is whether the recipients will also have to share in the cumulative prison terms that the perpetrators are going to be awarded?  Though I have a feeling that with the large number of recipients, merely queuing up in front of the nearest jail and passing through it at a leisurely pace will be enough.  If each citizens spends 10 minutes inside the jail in this exercise, a total of (1.2 * 10^9 * 10) / (365 * 24 * 60) = 22,831 man-years of imprisonment would have been served.  I am sure with this there will be some left over for their future crimes too.

Well, well!  So no citizen would mind doing that pass through if the Income Tax exemption is granted first.  Till that is done, let us bide our time and go through various treaties that have been signed by our beloved leaders in this and other matters.

Dipawali is okay.  But knowledge must always get precedence over filthy lucre, shouldn't it?  And, God willing, you may be able to figure out how to park your 15 lakhs overseas whenever you get it.