New Delhi: Brushing aside the opposition’s demand to roll back the move making it compulsory to furnish the Aadhaar number for filing of Income-Tax returns and applying for PAN, finance minister Arun Jaitley said the linking was necessary as people have multiple PAN cards and were using it to evade tax.
Replying to the debate on the Finance Bill 2017 which got the Lok Sabha’s nod on Wednesday with 40 official amendments, Jaitley said: “Aadhaar has biometric details, so its chances of misuse become minimal It is an anti-evasion measure which will benefit the country. So the government considers it right to implement it.”
During the debate, Mr Bhartruhari Mahtab (BJD) said the Supreme Court had said in September last year that Aadhaar is not mandatory and wanted to know whether the government was “forcing” people to have it.
“Yes, we are,” Jaitley said, adding, “If the technology, which has a network of 108 crore people and all tax-paying households have it, and they give it along with their ITR, then the scope for fraud and tax evasion comes down.”
“We have kept a provision that a person who does not have Aadhaar can say I have applied for Aadhaar. But we can’t allow people to say that I will not apply for an Aadhaar, but through multiple PAN cards will continue to evade taxes,” he said.
He also said that Aadhaar may become the only card required to identify a person, replacing Voter ID and PAN.
“A stage may come when unique identity card (aadhaar) may become the sole card. There are many countries where such a situation exists. There is a social security number in America and in India it (Aadhaar) could be the counterpart,” he said.
Mr Jaitley said the UIDAI had been conceptualised by the previous Congress-led UPA dispensation and the NDA government is putting it to use with 98 per cent adults or more than 108 crore people in India having been issued Aadhaar number.
The other main amendments in the Finance Bill included the reduction of the cap on cash transactions from Rs 3 lakh to Rs 2 lakh from April 1, merger of tribunals of different ministries and the proposal to launch electoral bonds.
The finance minister said while the cap on cash transactions is being lowered to curb black money generation, the move to introduce electoral bonds would help cleanse political funding.
