Budget 2020: Our commitment is to make sure tax payers are respected, said Nirmala Sitharaman

When asked about the tax charter that the tax department would bring in she said,"Other than us going around the country to tell tax administrators to ensure that face-to-face engagement with the taxpayers need not necessarily be there, to ensure that they are dealing with them more like wealth creators and to make sure that they would approach them, only to gather information. In spite of all this, you would still hear some comments occasionally about there is a level of harassment and so on. Our commitment is to make sure that taxpayers are respected and we honor them for their commitment in nation building that they are showing by being honest taxpayers has to be given an expression of sorts. Therefore, we came up with this and I must thank the principle adviser for that," she further mentioned.

"There are only three countries in the world, which have enshrined the rights of a tax-payer in their laws. This is to prove that the government's intent is not to harass anybody,"  she said, adding that it is an article of faith for us to respect wealth creators and that honest tax payers is not suspect and therefore we have made a point to bring in it into the act  itself as a charter, details of which will come out."

On the fiscal deficit targets, she said, "We had announced during the BE July 3.3, but subsequent to that, because of the challenges that we faced towards wanting to put more money in the hands of the people, to improve on consumption demand, to improve on investments which have to be from the public expenditure had to be kept up because the private investment was happening, but not at the pace in which it would helped the whole process, and equally because of various reasons -some natural disaster related, some because of the compliance difficulties in the process, and some others unexplained, goods and services tax (GST) collection coming down etc. So, one the one hand your revenue generation could not be pressed further and on the other, there was a very clear demand on public spending. It was so obvious that I had to go spending and there were various attempts made to release money from the government, government expenditure be carried out and make sure that no pending amounts were lying anywhere and so on. So, with both opposite sides being so strongly laid out, it was only obvious that without violating the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM), I had to seek that escape clause and therefore 0.5 percent forbearance was something which I had to invoke and therefore 3.8 percent this year."