If you remember the Maruti commercial, where the man is interested to know the efficiency figures of a NASA space shuttle, you’d realise it’s not just that man, but all of us trying to find ways to save money. We could be buying vegetables or a Rolls Royce, we never forget to bargain or find some way to pay less. It isn’t a bad thing, especially when you compete with more than a billion people every day to earn a living.
So you could bargain and pay less in a personal transaction. However, the government has a fixed taxation structure for the various channels through which it earns its revenue and there is no getting away from that. Some try to find loopholes, but sooner or later the law catches up and the smart move doesn’t appear to be as smart anymore. Our country is divided into many states, each state has its own Regional Transport Department which collects tax for a new car purchase and also charges for registration. The trouble is, the charges differ from state to state.
Image used for Representation
Now, if you buy a car in State A and pay all the charges to that particular Transport Department and later shift to State B for some reason, you will be have to pay a Road tax for using the vehicle in State B as well. The process is troublesome, confusing, time consuming and makes you doubt if India indeed is one country.
Some register their cars outside their home state on purpose, as the other state might be charging a lesser amount as tax. This is a practice followed by many High-end car owners across the country, as the cars themselves are expensive and even a slight difference in the amount of road tax they pay, saves a lot of money. Now, The Karnataka State Transport Department has seized 1000 such high end cars that have been registered outside the state till date. They collected an amount of Rs 14 crores as tax that these owners tried to evade by registering their cars in Pondicherry or neighboring states.
The Transport department will continue the enforcement on such vehicles as the city is expected to have more of such high end cars. They expect to collect another Rs 3 crore from seizures.
Source: ET