I am really enjoying your posts since last few days as you are making lots of sense in your posts but you seems to have messed up here. I this-time disagree with your post. As per the world bank our total tax to gdp ratio has risen from 8.9% in 2009 to 10.1% so we must appreciate the fact that we are heading in the right direction (even though it's happening slowly). Imagine only 1% appreciation means about 100 billion rupees of direct taxes from the new entrants.
Tax revenue (% of GDP) | Data | Table
First of all, 15% is not mere. Although I do understand that we need to widen the tax net/horizon but achieving a growth rate of 15% should be appreciated. What 15% growth rate means is you literally double your tax revenue every 5 years. That is a big achievement for any nation. Imagine our direct tax revenue in 2009/10 was 461 billion rupees which stood about 975 billion rupees in 2013/14 - a net increase of over 100% in just 4 years. Yes if we impose taxes on many non-taxable items and increase the number of tax payees we can quickly increase the tax revenue but that is a different chapter.
I think it had nothing to do with the rupee devaluation since the price of dollar stays intact (close to 98). In fact the net increase in the tax revenue during the last government was not as significant as is the case with the current year since we were losing the value of rupee by 10% each year. That means if hypothetically speaking, PPPP achieved a growth rate of 25% it is not wrong to say that you take away 10% out of 25% to get the true value of the money.
Lets keep the % aside for a moment, Imagine the total tax revenue in 2012/13 budget were 1,615,540 million rupees that is about 1600 billion rupees. Compare it with the budget 2013/14 revenue of 1900 billion rupees (1,917,708 million rupees). Net increase of about 300 billion rupees or 3 billion dollars in a single year.
Now compare it with the expected budget of 2014/15 - We are hoping to have the tax revenues 2345 billion rupees despite missing the target once again as always. That is a net increase of about 430 billion rupees (4.30 billion dollars) so it is not wrong to say that we managed to increase tax revenues by up to 7 billion dollars in just 2 years. It is not a big achievement but when you see the total budget of about 38 billion dollars and the net increase in tax collections of 7 billion dollars in 2 years... Despite posting low figures we can confidently say that we are heading towards the right direction. By this logic we might be aiming for 5 billion dollars increase in the next budget and perhaps 6-7 billion dollars in budget 2015-16. Not bad in my opinion