A few years back, often we used to hear the words "India is a poor country, we can't afford this/that/etc". Now, however, the situation is much much better. We are seen as the new force in the world, thanks to unrelenting efforts from our businessmen, and support from our politicians in the form of policies that make doing business easier than it was before.
Anyway the result of all this is that the govt has much more money in its hands than ever before. (How else would they have been able to declare the populist Rs 60,000 crore waiver?).
But this does not mean that all's well. There are still numerous ways in which money that should reach the govt is not actually reaching. Can we do something about it?
The first thing the earning class can do is: pay Income Tax properly. I am sure all those who visit this site would do that much. So am not going to talk about that.
Something else that we can do is: demanding a bill for each and every purchase we make, however small it may be.
We make numerous purchases every day, starting from 1 re. toffees to stuff that run into thousands. How many times do we insist on getting bills? Possibly never.
When we get a proper bill for our transaction, it will be recorded for eternity in the shop's account books. And they cannot evade tax. Am sure I don't need to tell you how much of a difference this will make. When we understand the difference one vote makes in a billion, we can understand the value of one bill in a billion too :)
There will be absolutely no difficulty in this. Most shopkeepers would be ready to give you a bill easily. As most of their transactions go unrecorded, they wont mind offering bills for one or two in between. The only possible demotivating factor here is that, sometimes you may have to pay more when you take a bill. But as good citizens of the country, we should not let that come in our way. When we are ready to buy something for 5000 Rs, we can shell out a couple of hundreds more.
So guys, I request all of us here to insist on bills for every transaction we make. Indirectly, lets add more to our govt's exchequer so that the powers that be can serve us better.