40 year old practice of paying Income Tax of all ministers of U.P. by Treasury finally ends

September 13: All ministers including the Chief Minister in Uttar Pradesh will now have to pay their own income tax. This might surprise some of the readers. But yes, it is a matter of fact that under the Uttar Pradesh Ministers’ Salaries, Allowances and Miscellaneous Act, 1981, the income tax of all ministers in the state was paid out of the government treasury since the last 40 years. For the last financial year, the state government paid Rs 86 lakh as income tax for members of Yogi Adityanath’s council of ministers.

However, after a news report made this revelation, several politicians said they were not even aware of the provision in the UP Act. Finally, Uttar Pradesh government on Friday decided that its ministers will start paying their own income taxes, ending a four-decade-old practice of the state exchequer shelling out the amount annually for them.

The Uttar Pradesh Ministers’ Salaries, Allowances and Miscellaneous Act, 1981 was enacted when Vishwanath Pratap Singh was the Chief Minister. A section of the Act says, “The salary referred to in sub-sections (1) and (2) shall be exclusive of the tax payable in respect of such salary (including perquisites) under any law relating to income tax for the time being in force, and such tax shall be borne by the state.” Since then, the law has been in force during the terms of 19 Chief Ministers and about 1,000 ministers.

The chief ministers who saved on their taxes have been from across parties — including Yogi Adityanath, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Akhilesh Yadav, Mayawati, Kalyan Singh, Ram Prakash Gupta, Rajnath Singh, Sripati Mishra, Vir Bahadur Singh and ND Tiwari.

In 1981, it was argued that the state government should bear the income tax burden as most ministers were from poor backgrounds and had meagre incomes. But over the years, the state has been led by leaders like Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati who is worth Rs. 111 crore, Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav, owns assets worth over Rs 37 crore and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath whose total assets are worth Rs 95,98,053.

This news has invited the wrath of the netizens. Some have even ascribed this Act as a ‘draconian law.’ A twitter user wrote, “Who knows there may be many such laws existing in our country as a result of which the burden of the ever growing rich ministers had to be borne by the common tax-payers of this nation.” Another social media user wrote, “Even the British would have felt ashamed to learn how a privileged section of the populace looted one’s own poor countrymen.”