Kolkata, July 2 (IANS): The West Bengal government’s decision to cut rebates on stamp duty and circle rates on property sales, that was announced on Monday night, is an early indication that more such doles will take a hit in the future.

In the backdrop of a 13 per cent shortfall in the targeted income from stamp duties and registration fees in the last financial year of 2023-24, the West Bengal finance department decided to do away with the existing two per cent rebate on stamp duty and 10 per cent rebate in circle rates henceforth.

As per revised estimates for the financial year of 2023-24, the stamps and registration fees head under the ‘state tax revenue’ column was recorded at Rs 6,623.43 crore, down from the budget estimate of Rs 7,473.79 crore for the same fiscal.

However, sources in the finance department, said that despite that decline, the state government has pegged a higher stamps and registration fees collection as per the budget estimates of the current financial year of 2024-25 at Rs 7,300.45 crore.

“Now with the first quarter of the current financial year already over, the necessity has surfaced of finding alternative avenues of boosting the stamps and registration fees, collection and hence we have done away with the rebates on stamp duty and circle rates,” said an official of the state finance department who refused to be named.

Officially, the state finance department has maintained that the move to allow rebates on stamp duties and circle rates was introduced in October 2021 amid the economic slowdown in wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and now since that crisis is over the state administration has decided to do away with the rebates.

However, economists say that this is a fiscal reality as doles cannot be continued indefinitely in a state’s economy where its tax revenue is highly excise driven.

They also said that in coming years more such rebates might be nixed unless the state administration finds alternative avenues of boosting revenue, the prerequisite for which is amending the land and Special Economic Zone (SEZ) policies to encourage big-ticket investments, both in the manufacturing and services sectors in the state.