Kolkata, June 24 (IANS). The Suvendu Adhikari government has aimed to increase West Bengal’s own tax revenue without imposing more tax burden on the people. To achieve this goal, it is very important to remove the shortcomings in tax collection.
An official of the state finance department said that although many people are saying that the budget proposals for 2026-27 presented by state Finance Minister Swapan Dasgupta did not have any specific guidelines to improve the tax revenue of the state, but the secret of revenue growth lies in the decisions that were taken from the first day of the new cabinet assuming charge.
The impact of the government’s decisions became visible and collections under some tax rates have improved. An important step in this direction is to make the tax collection system in stone quarries and sand mining business completely transparent. For this, the possibility of fraud in e-challans is being eliminated, which was widely prevalent during the previous Trinamool Congress regime.
The state finance department official said the process to identify government officials involved in the e-challan fraud system has begun and they will be replaced with spotless and honest officials. As per the present system, these e-challans are issued at various check-posts to trucks carrying sand from the river bed.
On the surface, there did not appear to be anything suspicious in these e-challans, but later it was revealed that fraud was used in preparing these challans. As a result, mining and trade operators avoided paying proper taxes to the state government and instead made informal payments in the form of bribes to corrupt officials.
A state finance department official said, “Now removing such shortcomings will kill two birds with one stone. On one hand, the practice of illegal collection of bribes in the system will end and on the other hand, the flow of revenue into the state’s own tax system will automatically increase.”
In fact, data presented by Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari during the ongoing budget session in the West Bengal Assembly on Tuesday indicated that the process of plugging the loopholes has already started generating additional revenue for the state exchequer.
According to the data, during the previous Trinamool Congress government, the state government’s earnings from stone mines, mainly located in Birbhum district, was around Rs 60 crore on an average. However, since the new cabinet took charge on May 9, the revenue received from this source has increased to Rs 83 crore.
According to the state government, these figures are an example of the fact that the state’s own tax revenue can be increased by removing loopholes in the tax collection system without imposing higher tax rates on the public.
During the budget speech in the Assembly on June 22, the Finance Minister had also made an important announcement, which was related to ensuring ‘ease of doing business’ in West Bengal. Under this, all investment proposals worth Rs 100 crore or more will be provided all necessary approvals through the ‘single-window system’ of the state government. This will provide relief to investors from the trouble of obtaining different permissions from different departments.
According to the Finance Department official, the main objective of this policy is certainly to increase the ease of doing business, but it also has the potential to eliminate bribery associated with the approval process.
Suvendu Adhikari said, “Many cases of corruption have come to light in the past in the system of obtaining different approvals from different departments, but when all the approvals will be given through the ‘single-window system’, such possibilities of corruption will be eliminated. New entrepreneurs will be able to start their business by paying only legitimate fees, which will also increase the state’s own revenue collection.”
–IANS
DCH/PM
