Income Tax Extra

Almost 30 years ago, I constructed a modest-sized house with a loan from my Bank. My job took me all over India and till my retirement, I did not have the opportunity of living in that house built with a mixture of the loan-amount and a lot of my sweat. I had found a good tenant soon after the construction was over.

After a few years, this first tenant moved to his own newly-constructed house. I was lucky in finding this tenant within a week of completion of construction but when he moved out, I went through an unenviable experience. The house was found to be too big for the middle-income group and too small for the higher income group!

Family after family inspected the house and told me that they would come and inform me “tomorrow” or “within a couple of days” but that tomorrow or those couple of days never came.

I felt like the parent of a girl of marriageable age, when families of prospective bride-grooms come to ‘see’ her, are fed well and leave, promising that they would convey their decision “within a week’ that never came. (Of course, I did not have to feed my prospective tenants.)

I could realize the plight of parents who get tired of ‘showing’ their daughters to the prospective grooms and hordes of their relatives.

I do not know how my house felt when she was rejected but I could imagine the state of the mind of a girl who had been ‘inspected’ by an unending series of prospective grooms but was still waiting for her prince charming.

Then there was the question of the rent-amount. Naturally, I expected the amount to be a little more than the earlier rent. I had to take into account the Union Finance Minister’s share in the rent by way of Income Tax.

When I told the rent-amount including the Finance Minister’s share, a few prospective tenants turned away.

I poured out my woes before a friend who happened to be an Income Tax practitioner. He listened to me patiently and suggested that I should ask such prospective tenants whether they had purchased packaged products any time. To my questioning look, he replied that till a couple of years before that, every packaged product stated the price on it and an addition ‘Local Taxes Extra’. “Similarly”, the friend suggested, “you quote your rent and add the words ‘Income Tax Extra’. If the prospective tenant says that such a practice had been abolished and the price includes taxes, you say that the Rules about indicating the price including taxes on packaged products relates to Sales Tax and not Income Tax!”

Of course after some time I did find a family willing to share my Income Tax burden.