Moral Hazard

Farm loan waive offs are really not a solution, only temporary relief

Farm_Life_Village_India

On June 11, 2017, Devendra Fadnavis, the chief minister of Maharasthra, decided to follow his Uttar Pradesh counterpart, Yogi Adityanath, in waiving-off loans to farmers in Maharashtra. The loans of small and marginal farmers have been waived off with immediate effect.

As far as other farmers are concerned, a committee has been set up to decide on a criteria for a further waive off. Initial estimates being made in the media suggest that this loan waiver will cost the Maharashtra government anywhere between Rs 25,000 crore to Rs 30,000 crore.

The union finance minister Arun Jaitley has refused to finance farm loan waive offs of the state governments. Given this, the government of Maharashtra will have to finance this waive off on its own, in order to repay the banks which have given these loans.
How will this impact the finances of the government of Maharashtra? In 2017-2018, the government of Maharashtra was expected to run a fiscal deficit of Rs 37,789 crore or 1.53 per cent of the GDP. Fiscal deficit is the difference between what a government earns and what it spends. (The source of all the numbers reflecting the financials of the Maharashtra government is http://www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/State%20Budget%202017-18/Maharashtra%20Budget%20Analysis%202017-18.pdf)

The loan waive offs to the farmers is expected to cost the farmers Rs 25,000 crore to Rs 30,000 crore. The state will have to finance this through borrowing more and this will add to the fiscal deficit of the state. At the upper level of Rs 30,000 crore, this would mean that the fiscal deficit would jump to Rs 67,789 crore or 2.74 per cent of the state gross domestic product (GDP), if everything else remains the same.

Even with the farm loan waiver the state’s fiscal deficit will be well within the 3 per cent limit that had been prescribed by the 14th Finance Commission. Having said that this borrowing will not do any good to the overall borrowings of Maharashtra.

In 2017-2018, the total debt of the government of Maharashtra is expected to be a little over Rs 4.13 lakh crore. The farm loan waiver will add another Rs 30,000 crore to this. In absolute terms, Maharashtra is the most indebted among all states in the country.

Though when expressed as a percentage of the state’s GDP, this comes to around 18 per cent of the state’s GDP, which is not very high in comparison to other states.

While the finance minister Arun Jaitley has stayed away from financing the farm loan waive offs of state governments, the question is does it really matter? The central government actually guarantees the debt taken on by the state government. Hence, in effect, the borrowings of the state governments are also effectively liabilities of the central government.

The only thing that Jaitley’s stance does is that it keeps the fiscal deficit of the central government under control. But the overall fiscal deficit of the central government and the state governments does go up, and that is the figure that matters.

The overall fiscal deficit of states has been a reason for worry in the recent past. In 2013-2014, the overall fiscal deficit of the state governments stood at 2.2 per cent of the GDP. This jumped to 3.6 per cent of the GDP in 2015-2016 before falling to 2.9 per cent of the GDP in 2016-2017.

With states like Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh before it, waiving off loans to farmers, the overall fiscal deficit of the states, will go up again in 2017-2018. More states are expected to follow suit. Demands are already being made in states like Punjab and Tamil Nadu for farm loan waivers. Given that several states have already waived off loans to farmers, other states will find it difficult not to waive off loans, as and when the demands start coming in.

This will push up the overall fiscal deficit of the nation.

When governments borrow more, they crowd out private borrowing and in the process, push up interest rates. While, the likelihood of something like this happening immediately are low because the growth in private borrowing remains slow. But as and when the economy picks up, there will be a problem.

Also, newsreports suggest that farmers have now started defaulting on their loans in expectation of the government of the state that they live in, waiving off their loan. In economics, this is termed as a moral hazard.

The economist and former Vice-Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States, Alan Blinder, writing in After the Music Stopped, says that “the central idea behind moral hazard is that people who are well insured against some risk are less likely to take pains (and incur costs) to avoid it”. In this context, it means farmers defaulting on their loans in expectation of them being waived off. It also leads to a deterioration in the credit culture, with farmers being expected their debts to be waived off even in the future.

Also, waive offs do not solve any of the structural problems of Indian agriculture. The biggest problem of Indian agriculture is that it employs many more people than it should. Agriculture employs close to half of India’s workforce and contributes around 14 per cent of the GDP. Clearly, people need to be moved away from agriculture. But for that low-skill jobs need to be created elsewhere, which is not happening.

Further, the average plot size on which agriculture is carried out over the years, has fallen dramatically over the years, making agriculture unviable in many cases. But it’s not easy to buy or sell agri land, given the change in land usage norms, or even otherwise. This makes it difficult for farmers to unlock some value of their land and raise the capital for doing something else.

Also, it does not help that infrastructure to sell and store agriculture produce in the country remains pathetic. Take the case of pulses. 2016-2017 was a year of bumper production in pulses, with the production going up by more than 35 per cent. But with very little storage facilities, farmers have had to make distress sales and the price of pulses has fallen by 19.5 per cent in May 2017, in comparison to the same period last year.

Unless, these wrongs are set right, waive offs of loans to farmers are only going to offer temporary relief to the farmers, and things will be soon back to as they were earlier.

The column appeared in www.business-standard.com on June 14, 2017

Dear Mr Urjit Patel, Have You Ever Heard of Wasim Barelvi?

For a man who rarely and barely speaks, the Reserve Bank of India governor Urjit Patel spoke quite a lot in the press conference that happened after the first monetary policy of this financial year was presented on April 6, 2017.

In response to the question, “What do you think are the implications of the farm loan waiver schemes and is it a cause of concern for the RBI?”, Patel had this to say: “There are several conceptual issues, if one were to put one’s hat as an economist on. I think it undermines an honest credit culture, it impacts credit discipline, it blunts incentives for future borrowers to repay, in other words, waivers engender moral hazard. It also entails at the end of the day transfer from tax payers to borrowers. If on account of this, overall Government borrowing goes up, yields on Government bonds also are impacted. Thereafter it can also lead to the crowding out of private borrowers as higher government borrowing can lead to an increase in cost of borrowing for others. I think we need to create a consensus such that loan waiver promises are eschewed, otherwise sub-sovereign fiscal challenges in this context could eventually affect the national balance sheet.”

Basically in one paragraph, Patel summarised all that is wrong about waiving off farmer loans or in fact, any loan. I had discussed most of these issues in my Diary dated April 5, 2017, last week.

The first issue that a waive-off of bank loans creates is that of a moral hazard. The economist Alan Blinder in his book After the Music Stopped writes that the “central idea behind moral hazard is that people who are well insured against some risk are less likely to take pains (and incur costs) to avoid it.”

This basically means that once the farmer sees a loan being waived off today, he will wait for elections in the future for the newer loans he takes on to be waived off as well. Essentially, he will see little incentive in repaying loans that he takes on in the future. Or as Patel put it: “it impacts credit discipline, it blunts incentives for future borrowers to repay”.

The second issue that a waive-off of bank loans creates is that it can lead to the crowding out of private borrowers. The state government waiving off the bank loans needs to compensate banks which had given these loans. In case of the Uttar Pradesh government which recently wrote off the loans, this amounts to Rs 36,359 crore. The government will have to borrow this amount in order to pay the banks simply because its earnings are lesser than its expenditure.

When a government borrows more, it leaves a lesser amount of money for others to borrow. This can push up interest rates and as Patel aptly puts it, “higher government borrowing can lead to an increase in cost of borrowing for others”. What also needs to be taken into account here is the fact that the Uttar Pradesh government waive-off might inspire other state governments to waive-off farmer loans as well. This will mean greater government borrowing and a higher crowding out effect.

It will also lead to the overall fiscal deficit of the nation (i.e. fiscal deficits of state governments plus that of the central government) going up. Fiscal deficit is the difference between what a government earns and what it spends during the course of a year. The difference between the earning and the spending is met through borrowing.

If several state governments waive-off bank loans and borrow more, it will lead to the national fiscal deficit going up. As Patel puts it: “sub-sovereign fiscal challenges in this context could eventually affect the national balance sheet.”

So far so good. It is nice to see the RBI governor speak out against what is essentially bad economics and can screw up the economic and financial situation of the nation. Nevertheless, the question is where has all this forthrightness been when it comes to the issue of corporate defaults and loan write-offs?

As is well known, corporates have defaulted on several lakhs of crore of bank loans over the years. These defaulters have been treated with kid gloves. Over the years, a huge amount of corporate loans have been written off. It needs to be mentioned here that loans written off are different from loans being waived off, at least theoretically.

This is something I discuss in detail in my new book India’s Big Government—The Intrusive State and How It is Hurting Us. The loans written off are no longer be a part of the balance sheet of the bank, even though they can be recovered in the future. There is no chance of recovery in case of a loan that is waived off. Hence, theoretically there is a difference between a write-off and a waive-off.

Let’s try and understand this issue in a little more detail. Let’s first take the case of the State Bank of India. As of April 1, 2015, the bank had Rs 56,725 crore of bad loans, or gross NPAs. During the course of the year, Rs 4,389 crore of bad loans was recovered. At the same time, the bank wrote off Rs 15,763 crore of bad loans. The loans written off would no longer be a part of the balance sheet of the bank, even though they could be recovered in the future.

As we can see in case of the State Bank of India, the total amount of the loans written off during the year was more than three times the total amount of the loans recovered. That tells us the sad state of the loan recovery process. There were also fresh bad loans that were added to the balance sheet of the bank during the course of the year, and by March 31, 2016, the total bad loans of the bank had slipped to Rs. 98,173 crore.

Or take a look at Table 1 which shows the overall scenario comparing write-offs and recoveries.

Table 1: Write-offs versus recoveries of public sector banks

Write-offs versus recoveries of public sector banks

YearWrites-Offs
(in Rs. Crore)		Recoveries
(in Rs. Crore)
2015-201659,54739,534
2014-201552,54241,236
2013-201434,40933,698
2012-201327,23119,832

Source: Reserve Bank of India

As is clear from Table 1, write-offs of public sector banks have been greater than their recoveries. And the absolute difference between the two has only gone up over the years. A bulk of these loans are corporate loans. Hence, it is safe to say on the basis of this data that a large portion of corporate loans which are written-off are over the years, are practically waived-off because banks are really not able to recover these loans.

Hence, if the issue of moral hazard comes up with farmer loan waive-offs, it also comes up with corporate loan write-offs. And given that a large portion of what is technically a write-off is actually a waive-off, the case for moral hazard in this case is really very strong. The RBI governor Patel could have talked about this as well, given that he has been in office for more than seven months now.

Over and above this, corporate loan write-offs have led to the situation of diminishing bank capital. This has led to the central government having to recapitalise the public sector banks over the years. Between 2009 and now, the amount of money put in has been greater than Rs 1,30,000 crore. This money is ultimately borrowed by the government and leads to crowding out, higher interest rates and a weaker national balance sheet. All these issues pointed out by Patel in case of farm loan waive-offs apply to corporate write-offs as well.

But a word hasn’t been spoken against them.

In the Diary dated March 22, 2017, I had quoted the British author George Orwell. In his book Animal Farm, Orwell writes: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The point being, if there is a moral hazard for the farmer, there is also one for corporates. And if the RBI governor has pointed out one, he should have pointed out the other as well.

Over the weekend, I came across a very interesting couplet which makes the same point has George Orwell did in the Animal Farm, but rather more forcefully.

As Wasim Barelvi, probably the greatest Urdu poet alive today, writes:

“Garib lehron par pehren bithaye jaate hain
samundaron ki talashi koi nahi leta”.

(I couldn’t come across a good translation of this couplet. Hence, I am leaving it untranslated. But its basic meaning is the same as the line from Orwell’s Animal Farm, quoted earlier).

The column originally appeared on April 10, 2017 on Equitymaster

With Farmer Loans Waived Off, UP Govt Has Its Oh Darling Ye Hai India Moment  

Given that I am a big film buff, I have watched my share of trashy cinema over the years and continue to do so. A particularly trashy film that I watched in 1995 (which was also the year that Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (DDLJ) released) was called Oh Darling Ye Hai India, and like DDLJ it also happened to star Shah Rukh Khan.

The title song of the movie had the line: “Jo bacha nahi wo baant dia,” which when translated into English essentially means, what has not been saved has already been distributed. Every time a government decides to waive off farmer loans, I am reminded of this song. And as I keep telling anyone who cares to listen, Hindi film lyricists have written songs for almost every situation that one can encounter in life, including farmer loans being waived off.

The question is why am I reminded of the song whenever a government waives off farmer loans or even talks about it. The government waiving off loans needs to compensate banks which had given loans to the farmers in the first place. Of course, the government hasn’t saved money to pay off these banks. And in that sense what has not been saved has already been distributed.

The newly elected Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh has decided to waive off loans worth Rs 30,729 crore to small and marginal farmers in the state. By doing this, it has met its major electoral promise. The state has 2.3 crore farmers. Of this number 1.85 crore are marginal farmers and 0.3 crore are small farmers. Farmers with landholdings of less than 2.5 acres are marginal farmers. Those with landholdings of 2.5 to 5 acres are considered as small farmers.

The waive off amounting to Rs 30,729 crore will benefit 86.68 lakh small and marginal farmers in the state. Over and above this, the state government has also decided to settle bad loans of 7 lakh farmers worth Rs 5,630 crore, with banks.

This puts the total cost at Rs 36,359 crore. The first question that comes up is where is the government going to get this money from? As I said earlier, what has not been saved has been distributed. The state government will bear the cost of funding the farmer loan waive offs and the bad loans settlement with the banks, as well.

Can the state government afford this? The answer is no. In 2016-2017, the UP government was projected to run a fiscal deficit of Rs 49,961 crore or around 4.04 per cent of the state’s gross domestic product (GDP). A government is said to run a fiscal deficit if its expenditure is more than its revenue during the course of the year. The state ended up running a fiscal deficit of Rs 55,020 crore or 4.45 per cent of the state GDP.

Hence, an expenditure of Rs 36,359 crore would add majorly to the state’s fiscal deficit. It would also add to the overall fiscal deficit of India (i.e. the fiscal deficit the state governments plus the central government) which is extremely high to begin with. As Neelkanth Mishra of Credit Suisse wrote in a recent column in the Business Standard: “In the past seven years, even as the absolute fiscal deficit of the Union government has been largely unchanged, that of the state governments has increased two-and-a-half times.”

The state government plans to issue farmer relief bonds in order to generate money for waiving off banks loans. Doubts have been raised whether investors would subscribe to these bonds given the bad financial state of the UP government. A guarantee from the government of India on these bonds is going to help.

I guess this forms one part of the argument. The move will not work out well for the UP government. Nevertheless, that was a given. And honestly, the last things many governments are bothered about is their financial position. So, how will this move work out for the farmers is the more important question.

No doubt it will provide them immediate relief to farmers facing two consecutive years of bad monsoons. At the same time, the state government deciding to settle the bad loans of nearly 7 lakh farmers, has made farmers who paid their loans on time, look like fools

Further, overall this move might not be such a great deal for the farmers. It is important to understand that the waive off does not take away the farmer’s need to borrow money from banks in the days to come. As former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan said in a December 2014 speech: “In some states on certain occasions we have had debt waivers. How effective these debt waivers have been? In fact the studies that we have typically show that they have been ineffective. In fact they have constrained the credit flow post waiver to the farmers.”

There are several ways in which farmers who have taken on the benefit of defaulting on bank loans, are denied loans in the time to come. As N Srinivasan, a rural finance consultant writes in the College of Agriculture Business magazine: “The experiences of the past show that there are many ways of denying credit to farmers who chose to benefit from default of bank loans. Delay in sanctions, high collateral requirements, reduction of quantum of loans, lengthy and complex documentation requests, etc. are some of the well known methods of denial of credit. These would be employed to good effect in the post- waiver situations by banks to cut their exposure to farm sector.” And this is possibly not good news for the farmers. If banks deny them credit in the future, they will go back to the local moneylender.

The third constituent in the waive off are the banks. Given that they will be reimbursed by the Uttar Pradesh government, they will not face any losses on the loans that they had given to farmers. But as I had pointed out in the Diary entry dated March 23, 2017, the waive off will create the issue of moral hazard in the days to come.

The economist Alan Blinder in his book After the Music Stopped writes that the “central idea behind moral hazard is that people who are well insured against some risk are less likely to take pains (and incur costs) to avoid it.”

This basically means that once the farmer sees a loan being waived off today, he will wait for elections in the future for the newer loans he takes on to be waived off as well. Essentially, he will see little incentive in repaying loans that he takes on in the future.

As the SBI Chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya said recently: “We feel that in case of a (farm) loan waiver there is always a fall in credit discipline because the people who get the waiver have expectations of future waivers as well. As such future loans given often remain unpaid… Today, the loans will come back as the government will pay for it but when we disburse loans again then the farmers will wait for the next elections expecting another waiver.” And this isn’t possibly a good thing, if the idea is to promote financial inclusion and take banking to more and more people.

Over and above, all these points, the decision of the Uttar Pradesh to waive off loans, is likely to lead to a similar demand and decisions from other states. Such demands have already been made in Maharashtra. They may soon be made in other states where elections are due in the months to come. And this is something which isn’t good for the nation as a whole.

If several state governments raise money in a quick time, it can push up interest rates as well, despite the fact that currently the demand for bank loans is low. It will also push up the combined fiscal deficit of the state governments and the central government, which as I said earlier in the piece, is already high.

To conclude, India, as well all know, is a land of contradictions. If one thing is true, then it’s possible that the opposite maybe true as well.

Hence, this brings us to the last question of the day: “If banks can write-off lakhs of crore of corporate loans, why can’t they be forced to waive off loans worth around Rs 36,000 crore?” Indeed, that is a good question to ask. (I know some people here would like to point out to me that a write off is different from a waive off. In case of a write off the bank can still try and recover the loan that has been defaulted on. I would request these people to look at the recovery rates of banks, before trying to explain the difference to me).

As I said at the beginning of this piece, Oh Darling Ye Hai India. And that perhaps, explains everything.

The column originally appeared on Equitymaster on April 5, 2017

Why Waiving Off UP Farm Loans is a Bad Idea, Nevertheless…

In the run-up to the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, the Bhartiya Janata Party had promised that it would waive off crop loans taken by the small and marginal farmers of the state.

Political parties promising to waive off crop loans is nothing new. Before the 2009, Lok Sabha elections, the Congress led United Progressive Alliance government had carried out a similar exercise.

The question, as always, is how much is it going to cost and where is the money going to come from? The State Bank of India in a research report expects the cost of waiving off crop loans to small and marginal farmers to come at around Rs 27,419.7 crore. How have they arrived at this estimate? The total loans given by banks to the agriculture sector in Uttar Pradesh stands at Rs 86,241 crore.

As the SBI report points out: “According to RBI data (2012), 31% of the direct agriculture finance went to marginal and small farmers (landholdings upto 2.5 acres). Taking this as a proxy for Uttar Pradesh as well, approximately Rs 27,419.70 crore will have to be waived off in case loan waiver scheme is implemented for the small and marginal farmers for all banks (scheduled commercial banks, cooperative banks and primary agricultural cooperative societies).”

The SBI estimate suggests that the loan waive off will cost around Rs 27,420 crore. The banks which had given these loans will have to be compensated for this waive off. The union agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh in a series of tweets on March 17,2017, made it clear that the union government wasn’t picking up the tab. In one of the tweets he said that, if any state government waives off the loans of small and marginal farmers using the state treasury, the move should be welcomed. Hence, from the looks of it, if the loans are waived off, the Uttar Pradesh government will have to pick up the tab.

Take a look at Figure 1. It shows the fiscal deficit of the Uttar Pradesh government over the years. A government is said to run a fiscal deficit if its revenue is less than its expenditure. This difference the government makes up through borrowing money.

As can be seen from Figure 1, the fiscal deficit of the state has risen at a much faster pace than its gross domestic product over the years. While, the state GDP has jumped by 59.3 per cent between 2011-2012 and 2015-2016, the fiscal deficit has jumped from 2.13 per cent of the state GDP to 5.57 per cent of the state GDP, at a much faster pace.

Figure 1:

YearGross Fiscal DeficitState GDP at current prices (in Rs crore)Fiscal Deficit as a percentage of GDP
2016-2017*49,96112,36,655^^4.04%^
2015-2016**64,31711,53,7955.57%
2014-201532,51310,43,3713.12%
2013-201423,6809,441462.51%
2012-201319,2408,22,9032.34%
2011-201215,4307,24,0492.13%

*budget estimate
**revised estimate
Source: /or GSDP, the RBI’s Database on Indian Economy.
For deficit, budget.up.nic.in and RBI Reports on State Finances
^Source: www.business-standard.com
^^ Calculated on the basis of 4.04 per cent and Rs 49,961 crore fiscal deficit estimates.

In 2016-2017 which is the current financial year, the fiscal deficit of the state government is expected to be at 4.04 per cent of the state GDP. In absolute terms it was expected to be at Rs 49,961 crore. If the Uttar Pradesh government waives off the loans during the course of this financial year, then the fiscal deficit in absolute terms would shoot to Rs 77,381 crore (Rs 49,961crore plus Rs 27,420 crore of the waive off), assuming that expenditure and revenue assumptions made at the beginning of the year, hold true. This works out to 6.26 per cent of the state’s gross domestic product and is a really high figure.

So, the question is can Uttar Pradesh government afford this? The answer clearly is no. Can the union government in Delhi afford it? The answer is yes. Rs 27,420 crore is not a large amount for it. But if it goes ahead and finances this write off, similar demands will be raised by other states as well. And given that the Bhartiya Janata Party governments now govern large parts of the country, it will be very difficult for the union government to say no.

Over and above the one-time cost to the state government, there is also the question of moral hazard. The economist Alan Blinder in his book After the Music Stopped writes that the “central idea behind moral hazard is that people who are well insured against some risk are less likely to take pains (and incur costs) to avoid it.”

This basically means that once the farmer sees a loan being waived off today, he will wait for elections in the future for the newer loans he takes on to be waived off as well. Essentially, he will see little incentive in repaying loans that he takes on in the future.

As the SBI Chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya said recently: “We feel that in case of a (farm) loan waiver there is always a fall in credit discipline because the people who get the waiver have expectations of future waivers as well. As such future loans given often remain unpaid… Today, the loans will come back as the government will pay for it but when we disburse loans again then the farmers will wait for the next elections expecting another waiver.”

All this makes tremendous sense. But given that we live in the age of whataboutery, you, dear reader, may comeback and ask us: “But what about the fact that banks have written off lakhs of crore of loans that they gave to corporates? If they can do that, why can’t they waive off Rs 27,420 crore?”

This is a very good question for which I really don’t have a straightforward answer. In situations like these I suggest, dear reader, that you read George Orwell. As he famously wrote in the Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”.

The point is that if there is a moral hazard for the farmer, there is also one for the corporates.

For today, we will leave it at that.

The column was originally published on March 22, 2016

What the Media Did Not Tell You About the Black Money Scheme

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The Income Declaration Scheme(IDS) which ended on September 30, 2016, led to the declaration of Rs 65,250 crore of black money. Black money is essentially money which has been earned but on which taxes have not been paid.

The declarations will be taxed at the rate of 45 per cent and hence, are likely to net the government Rs 29,362.5 crore, over the next year. Half of this amount will have to be paid during the course of this financial year by March 31, 2017. This basically means that the government will get Rs 14,681.25 crore, in this financial year. The remaining amount has to be paid by September 30, 2017.

The media, as usual, has gone on an overdrive, highlighting the success of the scheme. One comparison that has been made is with the Voluntary Disclosure of Income Scheme(VDIS) of 1997, the last black money declaration scheme offered by the government.

The October 2, 2016, Mumbai edition of The Times of India ran a graphic around this on its front page (given the number of advertisements that appear before the front page these days, one can hardly call the front page a front page these days). This graphic essentially said that the Income Declaration Scheme of 2016 has been 3 times bigger than VDIS of 1997. The logic for this is very straightforward. The total amount of black money declared under the VDIS 1997 was around Rs 33,000 crore. The tax collected on this at the rate of 30 per cent amounted to around Rs 10,000 crore.

The tax to be collected in the Income Declaration Scheme is three times at close to Rs 30,000 crorer. An editorial in The Economic Times published on October 3, 2016, states: “This is three times as much as the revenue garnered from the amnesty scheme of 1997.”

The trouble with this analysis is that it is very simplistic. The Indian economy now is significantly bigger than what it was in 1997-1998. The nominal GDP (a measure of the size of the economy) was 9.4 times bigger in 2015-2016 in comparison to 1997-1998. But, the total amount black money declared is only 2 times more (Rs 65,250 crore now in comparison to Rs 33,000 crore then). The tax collected is likely to be three times bigger.

Shouldn’t these basic factors be taken into account before declaring that tax collections are likely to be three times bigger? Also, the total number of declarants of black money in 2016 are 64,275. As per this Outlook story, the total number of declarants of black money in 1997 were 4.7 lakh.

The number of declarants in 2016 are way fewer than 1997, primarily because the black money declarations are now being taxed at 45 per cent against 30 per cent earlier. If the tax on the black money had been fixed at 30 per cent, the total number of declarants would have been more.

The trouble is that once we take all these factors into account, then the situation no longer remains simplistic. And once the situation is not simplistic, straightforward headlines which newspapers specialise in become difficult.  After taking all these factors into account, it is not so straightforward to say that the tax collected is three bigger.

Another factor that the media missed out on is the rise of the services sector as a part of the overall economy. The share of the services sector in the GDP has risen from 47.5 per cent in 1997-1998 to 59.93 per cent in 2013-2014.

As Arun Kumar points out in The Black Economy in India: “The services sector lends itself to black income generation since a) valuation of activity is difficult and b) it has a large component of the unorganised sector in it.”  Hence, it is safe to say that the total amount of black money as a share in the economy has risen over the last two decades.

Once these factors are taken into account, the Income Declaration Scheme no longer seems like the success it is being made out to be. Although it must be said that the government’s effort to tap into domestic black money has been much more successful than its effort to tap into black money that has left the shores of this country.

Last year the government had launched a black money window for foreign assets. Taking advantage of the compliance window, 644 declarants declared assets and income of Rs 4,164 crore in total. This meant that the government was able to collect around Rs 2,498.4 crore (60 per cent of Rs 4,164 crore) as tax revenues.

In comparison to this the Income Declaration Scheme for domestic black money has definitely been a success, but in the overall scheme of things, it is clearly not the success that it being made out to be.

Also, one danger that remains with all income declaration schemes is that they make the individuals who pay tax on time, year on year, look like idiots. Such schemes essentially tell people that as long as you are willing to pay a small penalty in the years to come, you can postpone the payment of taxes by paying a small penalty.

The Comptroller and Auditor General looked into the declarations that were made under the 1997 scheme and made some interesting observations. As it said: “The track record of declarants showed a clear scenario where they were found to have taken advantage of earlier Amnesty Schemes too…The Scheme was not in the interests of revenue and in fact it provided one more opportunity to dishonest assesses to pay tax at a preferred rate and then retire to the old habit of concealing income.”[i]

But for governments the black money amnesty schemes are an access to easy money, instead of making the more difficult decisions like shutting down loss-making companies (which to its credit the Modi government has started to push now).

To conclude, the real success of the scheme will be in the data that it will end up collecting. It needs to be made sure that the 64,275 individuals who have declared black money under the scheme, continue to pay tax in the years to come. That will be the real success of the scheme.

Hopefully, it is also the last of such schemes and in the years to come the government uses more and more information technology on expenditure data, in order to identify those who have black money and get them to cough up their share of taxes and fines. In the long-term, the only way of getting people to pay taxes is to get them to respect the system and at the same time ensure that the income tax laws are made simpler.

Postscript: If you want to read about black money issue in detail, subscribe to The Vivek Kaul Letter.

[i]A.Kumar, The Black Economy in India, Penguin Books India, 1999

The column was originally published on October 3, 2016, in Vivek Kaul’s Diary