Further, I am sure that these modifications will ensure that the small tax payers are not put to any harassment as a result of the proposed requirement of deduction of tax at source from bank interest and withdrawals from the national savings scheme. Hon. Members may be aware that under an existing provision in section 197 of the income tax act, individuals not having any tax liability can obtain payments without deduction of tax at source by furnishing a declaration in writing in duplicate in the prescribed from. At the outset, I would like to say that the government and the members of the cabinet the honourable finance minister, myself and the prime minister have spent several sleepless nights on this problem almost from the time when we took over in 1992. Shri Rajgopalachari, who was then the chief minister of madras, had brought this problem to the attention of the government of India. It was he who suggested that as a short cut to solving the problem of the handloom industry, the area of reservation might be increased and sarees and dhotis might be reserved for handlooms. He was impelled to do that because of the intense suffering of the handloom weavers in South India. The madras state, as it then was, retained the largest number of handloom weavers. There is no point in our saying today that millions of families are suffering or in our evaluating them in terms of numbers, for the reason that our statistics are all wrong. But there is no denying that the quantum of human beings dependent on the handloom industry is a very appreciable number. It does not matter whether the total number of handloom is 28 lakhs or 16 lakhs in 2002. So, we need not quarrel about the numbers affected. If there are sixteen lakhs of looms and there are eighty lakhs of people starving, there are a number of people who starve because of these unfortunate weavers not getting any work and all that follows is no income, no food, starvation and the misery multiplies.. It is essentially a human problem.
