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TURA, July 29
The Achik Indigenous Justice Initiative Forum (AIJIF), made a sensational revelation on Wednesday on how one Bidi company has been taking the state to the cleaners to an estimated Rs 36 crores over the past five years. The revelation comes after the AIJIF worked on a field survey of the entire Garo Hills region on the amount of taxes paid by one bidi company in particular – Pradip Bidi.
The bidi factory is based in Bongaigaon in Assam and has been sending their products all over the Garo Hills region. The poorer cousin of the cigarette, Pradip Bidi is widely popular amongst the rank and file within Garo Hills.According to the survey conducted by the AIJIF, the company does an average of Rs 2.2 crores worth of business per month and as such is liable to pay a tax of 27% of the total amount, coming to about Rs 60, 21000 per month. However, only an amount of about Rs 1,20000 is being paid every quarter by one Ramesh Saha of Baghmara.
“Per month a total of more than a 1000 packets are sent to various parts of Meghalaya while they only pay taxes for about 20 bags, that too every quarter. This means that each year they have been cheating the government of Meghalaya of an amount of tax of Rs 7.23 crores per year. This amounts to a whooping Rs36 crores in the last five year. This is a huge amount that is being converted by unscrupulous characters within the system”, said AIJIF director, Alex K Sangma.
The survey has also revealed that an association has been helping the bidi factory in this illegal evasion of taxes that the company rightly owes to the government.
“We also found that trading of the bidis was being done by one Chandan Ghosh, who acts as the sales conduit. However we found that he did not have the requisite documents to carry on the business and there were no taxes paid by them to even the Garo Hills Autonomous District Council (GHADC) for Trading for Non Tribals (TNT)”, revealed Alex.
“We went to various whole sellers to ask them as to how many bags they ordered per month and the numbers they gave were huge. Most of them were taking on an average of 8-10 bags per month, with some as high as 85 bags. Each bag has a total of 70,000 sticks in 2800 packets in 140 bundles”, revealed Alex.
The AIJIF has also questioned as to how the whole scam could have been going on under the radar and that too for so long. “How can this company carry on this tax evasion for so long within the region when they are all aware of bidis being a part of commodities sold? There seems something seriously wrong with the system or someone within is involved in hiding it”, said AIJIF coordinator, Stubent G Marak.
The revelation of the scam has now also put the scanner on other bidi companies that are selling their products in Meghalaya. The common companies that are popular in the region are Ranjan Bidi, Jaihind Bidi, Meghalaya Bidi, Star Bidi, Rocket Bidi amongst others and the scam could cross hundreds of crores in lost income to the state over the time frame mentioned.
The NGO has stated that it would move to the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence and Enforcement Department if no action to fine these companies for the scam is taken in the next week.
“This is a glaring example of how some unscrupulous people have been playing with the system and evading taxes. The same cannot be allowed as the same money could have been used for developmental activities at a time when the state is going through a serious financial crunch” added Marak.
