In its effort to curb black money, the Income Tax Department has seized or recovered at least Rs. 2.16 lakh crore from 2009 to November 2015, data from the annual reports of the Union Finance Ministry reveal.
Of this amount, undisclosed income declared in ‘Search and Seizure’ amounted to Rs. 72,800 crore, whereas Rs. 1.43 lakh crore was detected in ‘surveys’. Note that Rs. 71,195 crore of the amount detected in surveys pertains to the Cairn India survey case of Delhi 2013-14. ‘Search and seizure’ and ‘survey’ are among the main evidence collecting mechanisms for the Income Tax Department.
But this happens to be a tiny fraction of the estimated black economy, Arun Kumar, Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, who has done extensive research on Indian black money, told The Hindu .
By the most recent estimates by Professor Kumar (published in the Economic and Political Weekly in November 2016), the Indian black economy would be around 62 per cent of the GDP. In current prices, that would be around Rs. 93 lakh crore. Hence, the total undisclosed income found by the I-T Department in the past six years adds up to around 2.3 per cent of the estimated size of the black economy. “This is because the Income Tax Department is very corrupt,” Professor Kumar said. In the Voluntary Disclosure Scheme of 1997, with 4.66 lakh declarations, around Rs. 33,000 crore was disclosed — Rs. 7 lakh per declarant, on an average. In the scheme that ran from June to September 2016, 64,275 declarations worth Rs. 65,000 crore was disclosed, averaging around one crore per person.
