India Inc. - Investors required?

Every time when it comes to March, most people start thinking about their tax saving investments and decides to make some quick investments just to save some bucks. Even though due to this final minute rush we tend to lose hard earned money easily by opting for wrong investments. But the very human nature within us which once made us open textbooks on exam eve without even know which chapters to look for, makes us do this quick investments. Some guys can be really good at these final minute investments and they earn great benefits from it. But this trade is not for common man.

We need to plan tax in advance and do everything we could to save those bucks. In this blog, I am not going to discuss on how to plan for tax savings, because this could be the billionth blog to write that. So let's think about a plan of investing on India Inc. Now how is it possible to invest in India Inc. as a whole? We don't have any such physical entity called India Inc which could be found anywhere. It is just a jargon used by some wise men out there. So why not we make a real India Inc. out of it? How can we bring it alive?

Whatever you are going to read now is just a distant dream of a tax payer which may or may not materialize but if it does come alive, lot of things would change. India Inc. would work as a listed company. India Inc. would be the place where every single tax payers money in India would go. Every year the tax that we pay should go to India Inc., which will then be utilized by the Finance Minister of the country for growth or subsidies or whatever he would decide it to be used for. The whole sum that is shared by tax payers of India should be shared online on a website probably, also showing how much percentage of that money is invested in what sector. The sector wise investment may yield benefits or might just be an allowance for some group which actually doesn't matter for the investors or tax payers.

Government has full rights to decide how they want to utilize this money, but here they have to show what percentage of this money they have spend on a particular sector, what is the expected benefit out of that Year-on-Year and how much is expected by the end of 4years. Tax Payer should be able to login to the website of the India Inc. to see what is the current status of his investment. It should show the small picture by breaking down on different sectors percentage-wise/amount-wise the tax payed by him/her. He/She should be able to use his/her PAN number and secret password to know what is really happening with the money. Different sectors investment/payment/profit-loss data should be updated every month by the government and shared to public by this way. Every year there should be a newsletter send by post/e-mail to the tax payers to share what happened to their money. In case of huge profit which could be something above 20%, a small portion of it, about 5% should be shared with public as non-taxable income. The public here are tax payers only and not everyone having a PAN card since now you can have it without a job too.

In case a tax payer finds out that the information shared by the government is incorrect, he should be given legal rights to contest in court for the same. This will force governments to be more transparent. If a Finance minister cannot make profit or use the money as planned, he/she needs to explain to the nation on the failure and should not be given a second chance to handle the money for the India Inc. Making profit could be a distant dream, it would be better to quote using wisely for the growth of the country and where the growth is tangible. Every tax payer becomes an investor here forcibly since tax payment is a required thing for the growth of the country. There could be non-profitable investments like investing in Hockey welfare or  education for poor, but the stats should still show how many schools were opened, how many came through the classes, or did we win a Hockey cup/match...all this becomes the growth factor. This example was to show that growth may not be always related to money.

Based on the tax paid, he/she should be allocated with units which will be valued on the NAV of India Inc. The NAV method would be a good and easy way to track companies growth. People of India would be given a chance to vote for the key factors selection which will form the deciding factor for the net asset value for India Inc. Even though the weightage of tax payer votes will be lesser than weight of a Finance expert or government servants votes. Now when the NAV value keeps hitting the red, the people in charge needs to explain to tax payers. A government formed can decide whether to change the Finance minister or not every year if they find that India Inc. is not growing under him/her because the failure to grow would be treated as failure of the government since it makes it very tangible and transparent.

Now comes the real tough task of maintaining the data and sharing with the public. I would think of it being not with any government agencies due to n number of reasons.(Corruption, bribery, poor customer service to name a few). This should go to local/international private Finance companies which would do the book keeping. In case all this fails after two terms(10yrs), still we don't lose anything because we are still losing our hard earned money as tax with such high tax'es. But we are happy to lose it assuming it is for the growth of this great nation which was once at the helm of the world. We ought to be on top and would do everything what we could do best to get there.

it would feel painful when we lose those few thousand rupees end of a financial year, but at the same time be cheerful that there are few others(in billions) losing more than you and it is still for your country which still doesn't earn tax for oxygen and water!