The Hindu Business Line : <I>IT versus I-T</I>

It is about time we saw some of the benefits of an integrated national information network in the government. One has heard much hype about the new era of paperless government starting with online income-tax returns. Impressive, sure, but reality is somewhat depressing. A typically peremptory letter from the Income-Tax department a week ago tells me to ensure that I filed a tax return because its information services had found that I had invested over a certain sum during the year in mutual funds; and, of course, failing to follow the orders would have serious implications.

The letter was obviously computer generated. The department, one of the white elephants of the government that is known to cost more to maintain than the value of taxes collected, has been at great pains to tell us all about its elaborate information technology system. You would recall the Finance Minister so ominously proclaiming in introducing the cash withdrawal charge last year that they could track a great deal more of transactions than we generally believed. The PAN number is now mandatory in mutual fund applications, as well as bank deposit slips and, of course one does fill it in wherever asked for.

So what was the purpose of warning me of the dire consequences? If indeed the Department was so interested in its detective work, any high school student could tell them to how to query the system using assessee's name, address or number to see if returns had indeed been filed. Sympathetic accountants and officers of the Department would explain this obvious inefficiency simply by saying that place is a vast ocean where the right hand does not know, etc.

Yet one would have thought that the very purpose of a nationwide IT system was to handle oceans of data so that the right and left hand are both fully informed while interlinking data in a jiffy. The funny thing was not just the warning, no doubt obediently despatched following some instructions from the Finance Ministry, but the fact that this pattern of mutual fund investment is nothing new. No one has bothered to make any sort of connection all this while.

More proof that information is devalued and wasted in government offices is the same information being asked for repeatedly from the same person. Someone is vested with the power to write letters but he does not or will not bother checking on information already given in your annual returns, presumably stored on computers. So either you or your auditor is summoned to the presence to answer queries. And the odd thing is that this is apparently by some form of random selection which, by definition, ought not to throw up the same person again for a long while!

A good example of the total non-use of the benefits of IT by the I-T Department is the way the refund orders are sent to individuals. An ancient ritual requires that a separate advice also be sent to the RBI to honour the cheque — which I am reliably informed is not really a cheque but just an advice. So we need another advice, prepared and sent by hand, to validate this advice, without which the cheque (as we see it) will bounce. And it is no crime for the government of India to bounce it, of course. Is it any wonder that progress of anything like modernisation or simplification of the government is at snail's pace in our country despite all the pronouncements?

S. Ramachander

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