An infographic, explaining the retail selling price of petrol, was being circulated in the social media by IT cell of BJP. We are living in a world where even Government published data needs scrutiny, so how can a party led information be not scrutinized. So let's get to work. The infographic shows retail selling price of petrol in Delhi on 16/09/2017 is ₹70.48/ltr and the tax components shared between State and Union as: Delhi Government               = ₹27.44/ltr Central Government            = ₹12.46/ltr This prima facie creating an impression that Delhi enjoys more than double petrol tax compared with Centre. Firstly, the above claim is having a manifest arithmetical error. Simple addition of State VAT of  ₹14.98 with the purported central government share of excise duty ₹9.02 gives only  ₹24.00, not  ₹27.44 as depicted in the ...

In the early days of August, major news outlets carried headlines claiming huge growth of tax payers and tax collections, which they attributed to the positive outcomes of the demonetisation. I had done a detailed fact check of the above claim in an article in the wire . Couple of days back, media  reported, yet again, that revenue from the direct tax grew at 17.5% during Apr-Aug period, creating a perception that, there is a quantum leap in our tax collections. This needs to be analysed in detail to understand whether there is anything phenomenal about this growth or is this growth is following the current growth trend. This year’s union budget's target revenue collection was ₹9.80 lakh crores from direct tax, of which ₹5.39 lakh crores in corporate tax and ₹4.41 lakh crores in income tax. Meanwhile, the direct tax collected during Apr-Aug period is ₹2.24 lakh crores, which is 22.9% of the budget target of direct tax. During the same period last year, ₹1.89 l...