Tighten your seatbelts as this ITR session might get slightly out of hand. Or, on second thought, don't tie yourself down; you might need to go on a few chakkars of the daftar in a little hurry. Why? Because the Revenue Secretary, Tarun Bajaj, declared that the Central Government is not considering extending the ITR submission date beyond 31st July this year. This decision, very uncharacteristic of most Indian Government calendars, comes to change the norm of the deadline being extended. ⌛
The Secretary also added that close to 50 lakh ITRs were submitted on or closely before the deadline, and he has asked "his people" to be prepared to handle twice the number of submissions this year. This confidence comes from the fact that by the extended deadline of 31st December 2021 for the last financial year, around 5.89 crore returns were filed, and this year's returns as of 20th July are already really close to half of that number.
Claims of a robust website capable of handling this increased traffic seem a bit out of place from the same set of websites that cannot handle the task of displaying board results in an orderly way. But I speak from a 6-year-old experience, government websites must have developed a lot since then and can keep up with the current netizens' demands, right?
Scooting over a little from the everyday Joe's income, we discuss the fake entity, Reliance's profits. Of course, I use the term "fake" loosely and only mean "artificial" when I say it. The Ambani-owned corporate titan has reported that its Q1 profits went ⬆ by 24% to reach ₹4,335 crore, a significant rise from last year's ₹3,501 crore but not a large leap from last quarter's ₹4,173 crore. This might be Reliance "one big bang" before things spiral out of control as the Neo-Ambanis take the company's reins, or the next line of Ambani's might have inherited their grandfather's biz prowess and Reliance might still have a lot of juice left in its tanks. Only time will tell.