Kolkata: Bengal govt was working to improve tax buoyancy and plug revenue leakages to strengthen its financial position, state finance minister Swapan Dasgupta said on Saturday.Speaking at a symposium on ‘Financing Development Towards a Resurgent West Bengal’ organised by West Bengal Revenue Service Officers’ Association, Dasgupta said the state’s revenue performance had been affected by policy decisions in the past.“The state also lost a lot of revenue due to a tax-free or selective tax regime for rare earth minerals, coal and sand in the past, and we are plugging the leakages. We will have to increase revenue generation, reform the tax structure and improve overall tax buoyancy,” he said.Dasgupta also indicated that the govt was likely to take a policy decision soon to improve property tax collection by municipalities.Highlighting the need to remove institutional hurdles for businesses, he said: “If anyone wants to open a restaurant in Kolkata, he or she has to wait for one-and-a-half years to get clearances from fire, excise and other authorities. If these kinds of institutional obstacles are created against a business, how do we expect the relationship between taxpayers and tax officials not to be adversarial?”Addressing the programme, state higher education minister Jagannath Chattopadhyay said the state needed to increase its own tax revenue, particularly through SGST. “In this year’s budget, the total subsidy amount is pegged at Rs 1,000 crore less than last year’s revised estimate,” he said.Subrata Gupta, adviser to the CM, said Bengal’s revenue collection would have to increase to sustain various social development programmes, including Annapurna Yojana.
