Thursday, June 01, 2006
Don't stop Housing Loan exemptions !!!
Please do not stop the exemptions on housing loan and contribution to PF.
We are already paying the road tax, water tax, land tax, electricity bills etc. These are all required expenses for our day to day living.
In today's world, it is not possible to get a decent house without investing large sums of money. Where does this money come from ? - it comes from banks in form of loans. Thus these loans drive the economy.
Initially, why did the government give exemption on interest of housing loans ? - because it wanted to increase the investment in infrastructure and real investment. Is this goal achieved ? - NO. Then why stop them now? - if at all, they should be gradually decreased over a period of time.
People who have taken big loans for long periods by calculating the exemptions they will get, all their planning will go for a toss.
Do you feel it is fun to pay 60% of your salary as repayment towards housing loan and THEN, if the IT exemption is removed, to shell out 30% of the salary to the Income Tax department? So a person is left with only 10% of his salary to pay for food, water, clothing and electricity.
The Government should lower the lending rates of interest to 3-4% OR bring down the real estate prices to realistic levels before implementing this ill-thought proposal.
It is interesting that the government has still not done away with the exemption on agriculture income when it has been sufficiently proved that the benefits to be accrued from this exemption are not reaching the intended recipients - the poor farmers Or that they anyways fall out of the purview of taxable income simply because they don't earn more than 1.5 lakhs. OR maybe, the government is continuing these exemptions for exactly those reasons !!! - so that the political big cats can subvert the system by earning directly/indirectly crores of rupees and file it under agricultural income. I also heard/read somewhere that the Big B was also claiming to be a farmer :).
Also send in your comments to these people in Indian Government:
jstpl1@nic.in; dirtpl1@nic.in; dirtpl2@nic.in
