All sorts of goods offered in attractive packages for sale in the land used to display (in small print) until not too long ago the expression amounting to an amount in addition to the stated price of the product as taxes with no clue to the buyer whether that addition had legal sanction. Then came the rule making it mandatory to declare the price of the product with the legend ‘inclusive of tax,’ giving the false sense of satisfaction that there was no hanky-panky in declaring the price tag and demanding the declared amount from the buyers. That practice of showing the price of the product had an added feature of the abbreviated term MRP, meaning maximum retail price. The power of law concerning good practices of trading ended with that abbreviation given the smart move by the dealers of the product to print MRP on a bit of paper and sticking it to the package, once again in small print. That practice of conning the consumers, giving the impression of fairness in trading being not marked by uniformity across the country, seems to be the factor in the birth of yet another name for taxing the citizens namely, Goods and Services Tax (GST), rolled out at 12 midnight of July 1, 2017.

The story of taxing the citizens with just one kind of tax doesn’t end there. The government, which doesn’t trade in any commodity sought by citizens to satisfy their wants, collects money in the form of levy in a steadily growing list to fund its specific social, people-friendly schemes.

The rates of levy being fixed by the government and civic bodies are usually small with the exception of property tax (as in Mysuru) and excise levy on all manufactured products. For example, a manufacturer of a luxury automobile has openly disclosed that 50 per cent of its final sale price is tax amount collected by the government. The citizens are paying educational cess, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan cess, Krishi Kalyan cess, infrastructure cess, clean environment cess and what have you, going parallelly with frequent hikes of power tariff, water charges and so on. Only when the administration springs surprises by steeply hiking the rates of taxes, unlike the aforementioned cesses at low rates, the citizens gang up in protest, but it is the government that stands on the victory stand.

Volumes can be written on the right and wrong in the world of taxes in which the government is endowed with the power of authority and the corporates are playing with the gullibilities of customers for their products  — both necessities and luxuries. The citizens have no option but to gulp the Union Finance Minister’s glorification of GST as the harbinger of One Nation, One Tax, One  Market. If the citizens feel that they are not conned, the FM can sleep in peace.