Move to close zonal tax office

THE CBR’s reported move to abolish the local zonal income tax headquarters and merge it into the Multan zone came as a surprise to businessmen, traders and industrialists here.

The income tax zone comprised the three districts of Bahawalpur, Rahim Yar Khan and Lodhran with a total of 26 income tax offices. It was created several years ago on the persistent demand of the taxpayers, who were facing income tax problems here. They often had to pay visits to Multan zonal headquarters to settle their income tax cases. This was not only expensive for the small traders but also tiresome for them. On the demand of local trade organizations, the government upgraded the ITO to zonal headquarters to provide maximum facilities to the taxpayers and settle their appeals here.

The zonal IT headquarters here successfully carried out the CBR’s policies in respect of income tax collection and expanding its net over various sectors. The city had a number of business concerns, trade organizations, commercial institutions in addition to small and medium-size industries and a total of 300 cotton-ginning and pressing factories. In the circumstances, the CBR’s move to abolish IT zonal headquarters has been dismissed by the taxpayers, who will face adverse consequences in respect of their cases and appeals. Muttahida Markazi Anjuman-i-Tajran office-bearers and its affiliated unions, in addition to the IT department’s employees, have expressed concern over this merger move and also rejected the alternative proposal to open six facilitation centres to deal with IT cases here. Hundreds of employees were apprehending large-scale transfers, demotion and loss of seniority.

The closure of zonal headquarters here is a negation of the government’s claims to decentralize administrative powers at the lower level for the convenience of the people. On the one hand the government was advocating the success of the devolution plan and on the other, the existing offices meant for the provision of facilities locally were being merged or closed down without assessing their necessity and utility in respect of redress of grievances at the local level.

The taxpayers were also of the opinion that the higher authorities moved the anti-people proposal when the income tax department had already been allotted a piece of land on Yazman Road for the construction of an income tax complex, aimed at constructing all the IT offices at one place for the quick service of taxpayers. The merger proposal of local office into Multan headquarters will also create a sense of deprivation among the local population. The CBR and the federal government should give a second thought to this move, which should be dropped as being against the interests of local taxpayers.

IN the absence of a parking lot on the busy Circular Road here, difficulties were being faced by vehicular traffic on it. Farid Gate is a commercial centre and serves as a bank square owing to various banks’ branches around it. There are a number of markets, shopping plazas and commercial centres along the Circular Road from Farid Gate to Fowwara Chowk. The employees of these centres and the people coming for shopping there parked their vehicles and motorcycles almost in half of the portion of both the lanes of the dualised Circular Road. This creates hindrance in the flow of vehicular traffic.

The district government constructed the dualized road costing millions of rupees to ease traffic flow and beautify the city. But due to lack of a parking lot, traffic jams had become a permanent feature here daily, particularly during the hours of opening and closing of APWA school located on Circular Road near Farid Gate.

The primary responsibility in this regard is that of TMA, which had accorded approval to the maps of new markets and plazas without the provision of parking facility on this busy road. The district government and TMA officials should take note of it and examine the possibility of making provision for a parking lot either near Farid Gate or somewhere in the middle of Circular Road.

YAZMAN police claimed to have unearthed an inter-district cattle-lifters’ gang and arrested its ringleader, Rab Nawaz alias Ubli, along with his five accomplices.

According to the DPO, 29 stolen cattle worth Rs4 million were recovered from their possession.

Christmas tree in Russia reflects history

MOSCOW: With their hammers and sickles, cosmonauts and red stars, the decorations on many Russian Christmas trees -- on display until Orthodox Christmas on Sunday -- reflect a bygone atheist age.

“I prefer to use my box of old Soviet decorations which are so evocative, than to hang up the new, often bland ones they sell today,” says Yelena Vitugina, a 40-year-old Moscow cook.

She is always touched by the sight of one doll -- a traditional girl in the 1950s from Uzbekistan, one of the 15 sister republics of the Soviet Union.

Today, amid increasing nostalgia for the Soviet era, Moscow stalls, like those on the pedestrian Arbat Street, are helping to revive traditional Soviet decorations, with their ballerinas, parachutists and little red tractors.

The Christmas tree and the midnight dinner of New Year’s Eve, traditional in tsarist times, were banned by the atheistic Bolshevik regime of 1925, banished as “bourgeois” symbols.

Ten years later, the New Year’s tree was rehabilitated by Stalin, although celebrations marking the birth of Christ -- on the night of Jan 6-7 in Orthodox tradition -- would officially not take place again until the Soviet collapse of 1991.

In 1937, at the height of Stalin’s repressions, a gigantic fir tree topped with a red star was installed for the first time in the centre of Moscow.

The first decorations displayed portraits of Lenin and Stalin, starting a tradition of a politically-charged New Year festival.

In 1937 the people’s commissariat for education published a book entitled “The New Year at the nursery school”, prescribed that the fir tree “crowned with a red star... symbolising a radiant and happy childhood made possible thanks to the (Communist) Party.” Even if New Year’s Day was relatively un-politicised compared to other national holidays, “each historical or political twist found its illustration in the tree decorations,” said political analyst Boris Kagarlitsky.

During World War II, trees were decorated with small tanks, guns, parachutists and rescue dogs.

Shortages forced Soviet citizens to learn to make decorations themselves by repainting worn bulbs or soaking objects in a solution soaked with salt to create a snow crystal effect.

The designers of Soviet decorations watched the preferences of their leader closely, producing hockey players or circus acrobats as soon as Stalin evoked these professions in his speeches.

Then in the reign of his agriculture-obsessed successor, Nikita Khrushchev, the first corn-ear baubles appeared on New Year’s trees.

The exploration of space gave life to innumerable cosmonaut decorations -- echoing the angels of the Christian Christmas tree -- as well as Soviet Sputniks and miniature rockets.

Decorations representing bundled up polar explorers and polar bears were another Soviet favourite.

With the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, factories making decorations found themselves without government orders or Party guidance, and were forced to take their cues from the market. —AFP

Liz Hurley to wear sari

MUMBAI: British model and actress Elizabeth Hurley will wear a 4,000 pound (roughly 360,000 rupees) ink silk sari for her traditional Indian-style wedding to businessman Arun Nayar, which is set for early March, a newspaper said on Friday. Hurley, the former lover of Hollywood actor Hugh Grant, had said in August that she would marry Nayar, a jetsetting Indian businessman, ‘very soon’.—Reuters