Rediff carried a story in January 1998 which said,
The much-publicised Voluntary Disclosure of Income Scheme -- VDIS -- has netted a whopping Rs 100.50 billion as tax revenue from 466,031 assessees declaring undisclosed assets of Rs 33 billion.
That's 33,000 Crores of money converted from Black into White, with 10,000 Crores going to the Government as tax revenues. So what happened to the balance 23,000 Crores? This money was in the hands of just 466,031 individuals, though no one will ever know who these people are since the then Finance Minister P. Chidambaram had declared that the IT Dept. would put the VDIS papers in sealed packages which won't be opened under any circumstances, not even for monitoring the future behaviour of VDIS declarants.
If such a large amount of 23,000 crores was available for injection into the economy in the private sector five years ago, one would expect a huge surge in investment into various activities that should have registered more than blip on the economic radar by now. Is there any evidence of this happening? If not, what happened to the 23,000 Crores?
I'd like to find out more about this. Can anyone else throw light on this?
One possible reason for the absence of any blip is that all of the 23,000 crores (or most of it) had already been invested, although it had been undeclared. VDIS just helped to convert all of it into white money.
Posted by: Satya | September 18, 2003 at 05:11 AM