Toilet Seat Tax

DESPERATE SITUATIONS call for desperate measures. Staring at a grave financial crisis, the Congress government in Himachal Pradesh recently mooted a proposal to levy what was called the Toilet Seat Tax. Yes, you read it right: Toilet Seat Tax (TST). Every house in urban Himachal was expected to pay ₹25 per toilet seat per month to the cash-strapped government which was unable to pay salaries to its employees for months on end. Given how common it is now to build en suite bathrooms, the Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu government had clearly come up with a novel idea, believing it could collect a goodly sum month after month to pay for Rahul Gandhi’s freebie ‘guarantees’. His khata-khat economics necessarily demanded such khata-khat taxation measures, didn’t it?

The wages of populism had brought not only the Congress government in the hill state to the brink of bankruptcy but at least two other party-run governments, in Karnataka and Andhra, were also staring at severe financial crises. The solution lay in either soaking the middle class to pay for Rahul’s extravagant ‘guarantees’, or to think up measures such as Sukhu’s TST. Unfortunately, even the poor now tend to have toilets in their homes, especially after the success of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat campaign.

Modi’s emphasis on hygiene and sanitation having found traction, with tens of thousands of toilets built by the poor around the country, the Congress leadership, one suspects, may have also drawn satisfaction insofar as the slapping of TST was concerned. It would not only have yielded the vital revenue for the cash-strapped state, but in the process, it could well have undone Modi’s signature Swachh Bharat Mission, causing people to dismantle toilets built with financial assistance from the Modi government. After all, Sukhu had blamed the previous BJP government for the financial crisis, saying, please note, it “built too many schools”.

Clearly, a lot of thought seemed to have gone into formulating the Toilet Seat Tax. To ensure that there was no evasion of toilet tax, district officers were to be tasked to certify that people did not declare fewer toilets than they actually had in their homes. Which reminds us of the infamous window tax the British had endured for over 150 years, beginning the late-18th century. The more windows they had in their homes, the more tax they paid. As a result, English homes came to have far fewer windows to the detriment of both good health and aesthetics.

At least, the official window-peepers could detect tax evasion from outside without having to inspect each house, but in the case of the toilet tax, it would have necessarily entailed inspectors visiting each house and counting the number of toilets. Happily, after the proposal was received with much derision and commonsensical opposition, the voodoo economists in the inner councils of the Gandhi scion dropped the idea, at least for the present. However, it was a surprise how the purveyor of the khata-khat economic miracle had allowed the Sukhu government to slap a flat ₹100 charge on each household water connection, especially when the previous BJP government had promised to provide “free water” to each household. But then, like almost everything Rahul says, it is hard to find reason in his directions to party chief ministers. Poor Sukhu was left with egg on his face, seeking relief in toilets while executing Rahul’s guarantees.

Meanwhile, we will keep our ears perked for news about such weird tax ideas from Karnataka and Andhra, the two states where the bill for such guarantees has cut huge holes in their budgets.

ARVIND KEJRIWAL, AAP supremo and former Delhi chief minister, need not have gone through the motions of vacating the controversial ‘Sheesh Mahal’, and moving into an equally well-appointed bungalow allotted to Ashok Mittal, the halwai-turned-‘educationist’ from Punjab whom he had ‘arranged’ to send to Rajya Sabha from the party’s quota in Punjab. For, instead of handing over a vacant bungalow to the PWD, as is the norm, after duly accounting for all the fittings and fixtures inside, Kejriwal merely went through the motions of handing over the keys for the benefit of TV cameras while fully retaining control over it. That said, Kejriwal was unlikely to earn brownie points from leaving one large official bungalow and moving into another, albeit allotted to Mittal, who like most wealthy MPs, had lavished his own money to do it up in style. If Kejriwal was keen to make a point about simple living and high thinking, he ought to have moved into his own humble flat on the outskirts of the city from where he had participated in the Anna Hazare anti-corruption campaign. Now, it was only ‘high’ living and low thinking.

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Virendra Kapoor