Singh is one of thousands of rich landowners who don’t need to pay taxes thanks to laws designed to help the hundreds of millions of poor farmers who scratch a living from India’s soil. The average Indian farmer has less than 2 acres (0.8 hectares) and most struggle to eat two meals a day. Singh’s family farm has 100 acres.
Worse still, some people are buying agricultural land to avoid paying taxes by declaring their earnings as returns from farming, opposition lawmaker Sharad Yadav told parliament in March. Citizens declared about $29 trillion worth of agricultural income in the year through March 2011. That’s almost 15 times the value of India’s economy.
The figure was the result of a Right to Information request by a former tax officer Vijay Sharma, who says the number is probably a computation error and should be closer to 1 percent of GDP or $20 billion. Several requests for clarification from the government have gone unheeded, which pushed him to approach the courts. In the nine years through March 2016, Indians declared $21 billion as agricultural income, according to provisional data from the Revenue Department. The confusion, however, underscores the fog of uncertainty surrounding the estimates.
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