CA Himanshu Kumar
After a seemingly endless amount of time, the salaried class seeks after a ‘typical man cordial’ Budget that may oversee family unit spending plans, regardless of expansion. Key procurements in direct duties that might be taken a gander at in this Budget, especially for the salaried class of people, are the following:
1. Tax on Individuals: The slab rates for individual tax payers should be raised in order to bring them in parity to other countries of the world.
2. Transport Allowance: The limit of INR.1600 per month is quite nominal keeping in mind the raising conveyance cost. Hence the same should be revisited to say INR 3000 per month.
3. Education allowance: The exemption limit of Rs. 100 per month needs to be considerably raised upwards, say to minimum of Rs. 1,000 per month to bring it in line with the rising inflation and cost of education.
4. Medical expenses: The current exemption limit of INR 15000 was revisited many years ago and the same should be revised to say INR. 50000 per annum.
5. Leave Travel concession: Currently the same is allowed for travel within India. We recommend that the same should be allowed for travel outside India as well as travelling abroad for holidays is quite frequent these days due to availability of low cost packages to the customers.
6. Deductions under Section 80C: We propose that the limit should be increased to say INR 250000 from the current INR 150000. As the same will allow individual tax payers to have more tax benefits as well as the Government to use that money for infrastructure development
7. Deduction in Respect of Insurance Premium: Presently, deduction under Section 80C of the Act is available for payments made for life insurance premium and deduction under Section 80D is available for payments for medical insurance premium. It is recommended that premium paid for personal accident policy, home insurance and travel policy should be allowed as deduction to the policy holders.
Hope the Finance Minister reads this. Let us hope for the best, in any case.