A deadly game.

No one has ever won a Nobel Prize in economics in India but we have an endless supply of twisted brains creating new ways of taxing the exhausted people. Now someone called Kirit Parikh, who heads a think-tank called Integrated Research and Action for Development, has proposed that road tax on diesel vehicles should be increased compared to those which run on petrol and they should be made to pay tax every year. " For normal cars it can be higher by between Rs 10,000 and Rs 20,000 for diesel version and for the sports utility vehicles ( SUV ), it should be higher by up to Rs 50,000," he said. TOI, 27 November. In India we pay a one-time road tax at the time of buying a new car which is a great earner for the government because it gets all the money up front and, since the tax is collected and deposited by the dealer, the government saves on manpower to collect the tax. Car owners do not object to the increase in the prices of cars because it takes away the yearly torture of standing in queues and having to deal with rude and unhelpful sarkari savages. The reason for this perverse idea is that diesel is cheaper than petrol because of extremely high taxes on petrol. Good economics would dictate that taxes on petrol should be brought down while the price of diesel is raised so that both cost the same which will take away the advantage of diesel vehicles. There is a constant barrage of lies in the media on how there are too many cars on our roads creating traffic jams and air pollution. Bus lanes have been created on already busy roads to force car owners to use public transport. Not one person has the honesty to point out that every year 14 million cars are sold in China while Indians, with the same population, buy only 1 million cars. This year it will be less than that. Why does the Chinese government try to improve the lives of its people while ours tries constantly to make us poorer? Just as the airlines industry has been brought to its knees by taxes so the car industry is also going to be suffocated. The result is that the OECD reckons that growth will drop to just 4.4% this year. Meanwhile the Congress is going full speed ahead with its preparations for 2014. It has announced that from 1 January benefits for the poor will be transferred directly into bank accounts of recipients. At first it will be in 51 districts in 14 states and will be extended to the whole country by the year end. They have even devised a slogan - " aap ke paisa, aap ke haath " which means " your money, ( in ) your hands ". Not quite. It is taxpayer money and the hand is the election symbol of the Congress. Accused that it is bribing voters our most revered Finance Minister said," It is an absurd argument.... People should choose their words carefully." Surely. But he is the man who is responsible for the desperate state of the economy because of what he did in 2008 to win in 2009. He claims that it is a " game changer ". Maybe. But deadly for the people.