Taxes! What fun!

It’s that time of the year when everyone and his dog is accosted on the streets or in marketplaces by sprightly young television journalists with faux accents and asked that immortal question: “If you were finance minister, what would you do?”

This annual ritual that television channels go through is, I suspect, intended solely for the ostensible entertainment value of seeing completely clueless ‘mango people’ (aam aadmi) — who can’t tell Section 80C from a hole in the ground and who probably make a colossal mess of their own household budget — hold forth on the minutiae of macroeconomics. If any purpose — other than the generation of an excess of hot air — is served by such mind-numbing programmes, it isn’t immediately obvious.

In fact, the first thing I’d do if I were Finance Minister — ahem! — is to impose a hefty ‘tedium tax’ on frivolous news shows such as these. The entire proceeds therefrom will be used to set up a Mitigation Fund to finance carbon offset provisions that will more than compensate for every syllable of hot air so gratuitously generated by such television programmes.

There. Now that I’ve made my first major contribution towards balancing the national budget (and, in the process, given in to some climate change do-goodism), let’s see what else we can do to spice up this year’s Budget.

Right from the taxation proposals to the annual Budget speech, everything has become so formulaic you’d think a computer auto-program could do it. First, of course, there’s the ritual photo-op with a suitcase-ful of budget papers. (There’s another meaningless ritual just begging to be taxed!)Straight off, it’s obvious that there’s one aspect of the entire Budget process that would be vastly improved with some infusion of life. For some unfathomable reason, the whole process has been made tiresome and boring — unless you’re the kind of person who gets his jollies from an appreciation of the nuanced difference between Sections 33ABA and 35AAB of the Indian Income Tax Act, 1961. (And that’s not even counting the endless joys offered by the myriad subsections.)

Then there are the taxation proposals themselves: finance minister after finance minister unfailingly tinkers with and tweaks a handful of taxation proposals: raise taxes on cigarettes and pan masala, lower excise duty on, say, branded jewellery (cue: throw in a limp joke intended to gratify women), raise and expand service tax, lower income tax surcharge one year (and raise them the next). He then sprinkles his speech with some completely non sequitur quotes from Thiruvalluvar (or Rabindranath Tagore), to signal that he’s winding down; I suspect it’s intended as a wake-up call to such of his parliamentarian colleagues who couldn’t keep their eyes open through the speech.

The cruel irony is that the process of levying — and paying — taxes or getting tax credits needn’t be so utterly boring. Down the ages, rulers and finance ministers have taxed a wide range of goods and services; but so oddly goofy have some of these taxation proposals been that I dare say even the paying public had a good laugh when they forked out to the taxman. And even when they didn’t fancy paying the tax, they made their objections known in artfully comical fashion.

Consider the range of bizarre taxation proposals over centuries. In ancient times, there were taxes levied on urine (by the Roman emperor Vespasian), on beards (by Russian emperor Peter the Great), on bachelorhood, on wig powder, on windows and on tattoos.

In more recent times, cities and towns around the world have experimented with taxes on everything from low-waist jeans to calorific food (in the US) to disposable wooden chopsticks (in China, to avert large-scale deforestation).

Other efforts at innovative and offbeat taxation have met with comical responses from a non-compliant constituency. In New Zealand, for instance, the government introduced a tax on the flatulence emitted by farmers’ sheep and cattle, claiming that the smelly gaseous releases, which contained methane, were an environmental problem. The tax proceeds were to be used to fund research on agricultural emissions — rather like the carbon offset proposal I outlined above. But the good farmers of New Zealand weren’t amused, and mailed parcels of sheep and cow manure to lawmakers to protest the ‘flatulence tax’.

So, really, the only thing that limits Pranab-da’s efforts at balancing the budget — which he’s outlined as one of his top priorities — is his own imagination. If he can find a way to make his Budget speech and his taxation proposals rather more fun — perhaps even sexy — I imagine he’ll have taxpayers queuing up to pay their due. That will help restore some balance to our public finances — and Pranab-da could well be remembered as the funkiest, most popular Finance Ministers in Indian political history.