Only pain, no gain

This is with reference to the editorial, ‘Too many grey areas’ (January 2). There was no mention of the three objectives that were to be achieved after 50 days of continuous pain. We expected that he would disclose exactly how much old currency came back to banks and how far black money, fake currency and terror financing were curbed. He said that political parties should move away from a holier than thou approach — however, that has to start with his own party. It looks like the even the Government has realised that demonetisation has not achieved the desired results.

Bal Govind

Noida, Uttar Pradesh

The real challenge lies in ensuring the availability of funds on a consistent basis for welfare measures. Currency with the public has merely shifted to banks in the form of demand deposits. Further, the high denomination notes have more or less come back to banks. Government had earlier estimated the gap to be much higher, which would have benefited the economy. The cost of the welfare measures along with the budgetary expectations entails huge sums of money. The demonetisation exercise alone would not be able to create the corpus to meet this expenditure.

It is imperative that the Government further intensifies the black money drive by tracking down benami assets and investigating those who hold assets disproportionate to income, including investment in gold. The government should go all-out to bring back unaccounted money stashed offshore. It also needs to revisit section 13A under which political donations are exempt from tax.

Srinivasan Velamur

Chennai

Must-do reforms

Two reforms are a must. There should be a limit of ₹70 lakh per constituency for parties; they should be asked to create an expenditure eligibility fund for this. Donations of ₹2,000 and more to parties should carry the names of the donors; such cash collections should be limited to 25 per cent of the expenditure eligibility fund. Any excess should be made over to the Election Commission.

PV Maiya

Email

This refers to ‘Corruption is in our DNA’ by Sandhya Rao (From the Viewsroom, January 2) . Many of us are willing to pay, either because of compulsion or to make the process smoother. Recently I was travelling by train from Kumbakonam to Bengaluru. A group of cooks travelling without ID cards were asked to pay a penalty of ₹4,500; the matter was settled with a bribe of 500.Often, we indirectly become party to corrupt practices. At the individual level we pay bribes as a matter of routine to get various jobs done. It’s been rightly said we are dishonest across caste, region and community.

How to break this system? We can move to a cashless (or less cash) economy; sensitise people to ‘dharma’; remove the role of government in non-core activities; and remove the need for money to fight elections.

S Kalyanasundaram

Email

All talk, no action

There’s been a lot of talk about GST, but no implementation. The main reason is that no State wants to relinquish its authority on tax collection from the business segment. Corruption in different government bodies is also a reason for not handing over authority to the Centre. It is well-known that single window is better than multiple windows, which only encourage power wrestling among different power houses; businesses will be worst-affected.

Yogesh Jindal

Email

Losing the fizz

The Government borrowed for 50 days, high denomination cash from its citizens. Upwards of 95 per cent of issued notes are back in the vaults .Banks are flush with money. The rates cut today comes at a time when both the economy and market sentiments are at a low ebb. The reduction could have come in January-March 2016 itself when the going was good. If the US Fed in 2008-09 could bail out AIG with $ 182 billion, surely our banking sector could have been rescued too.

R Narayanan

Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh

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