Students too under IT glare
It is not super stars like Amitabh Bachan alone who attract the attention of Income Tax investigators; even rich students do. The Income-Tax department has sent a circular to educational institutions across Maharashtra seeking information about students who have paid fees of Rs 1 lakh and above per annum for the last four years. This is being done to monitor the sources of income of parents. An annual fee of one lakh rupees is not really something big in many of the top schools. In Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh there are fancy prices for medical and engineering education. An MBBS seat in a private college costs as much as fifty lakh rupees and an engineering seat could be around fifteen lakhs. Of course most of this money goes in black and so is normally out of the jurisdiction of Income Tax. It is almost openly declared that the transfer industry in the Revenue department itself is a multi- crore industry which also go out of the IT scanner. Many of the senior officers who could not get the places of their choice are heard saying that they could not get them because they could not pay the correct price. The fact is – there is a price and even these people were willing to pay if the price was right. Then should they complain that people who paid higher prices got the posts? They richly deserve!