Actively working towards clean political funding: FM

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SME Times News Bureau | 22 Jul, 2017
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Saturday said the government was actively working towards providing a system of clean political funding.

"When we deal with the subject of how the political system will be funded, we hope through cleaner money in future. We are actively working on this," he said here at the Delhi Economics Conclave 2017 organised by the Finance Ministry.

Jaitley said for the past 70 years, Indian democracy has been funded by "invisible money".

Demonetisation coupled with the implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime will help towards the objective by creating greater compliance and increasing digitisation, the Finance Minister said.

"Signs of increasing digitisation are already visible through expansion of direct and indirect taxpayer base," he noted.

Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who was also present at the Conclave, said India's implementation of GST was impressive not only from economic but also from political perspective.

"Building political support for good economics is impressive. How invisible money, corruption are being tackled in India is impressive," Shanmugaratnam said.

He said the challenges in advanced and developing economies are similar just that the scale of India's challenges are larger.

"There is a commonality of challenges. India is not the only democracy with the problem of invisible money," he added.