Money Laundering related to agricultural land reforms
Do you know which is India's biggest laundry converting humungous amounts of black money into white? It is Agricultural Income!! which in India remains tax free. I have always been a proponent of taxing agricultural land holders by putting a reasonable ceiling on land holding to exclude the poor farmers from the tax burden - say landholders owning less than ten to fifteen acres of land. When India was ruled by Kings, what was the revenue for the kingdom? - nothing but land revenue paid in cash or kind (produce from the land based on land holding. Unfortunately, in modern India, this source of revenue for the Government is a strict no - no. Why? because most politicians are land owners and "farmers" at least on paper! and they can convert ill gotten gains into tax free income by showing it as agricultural income. Nowadays this is not restricted to politicians only! You will find a whole host of industrialists who suddenly become farmers once they realise that the tax on i