NEW DELHI – Finance Minister of India Arun Jaitley on Sunday said that the bulk of black money is within India just a few days following the closure of the government's compliance window for the declaration of foreign assets and income under the Black Money Act.

“The bulk of black money is still within India. We thus need a change in national attitude where plastic currency becomes the norm and cash an exception,” Jaitley said in post on his official Facebook page. He also said that high tax regimes of the past led to an increased incidence of tax evasion.

The compliance window closed on September 30, and saw 638 declarations of foreign income and assets worth 3,770 crore Indian rupees. The finance minister laid the blame for the incidence of tax evasion on the previous governments and their high tax rates.

“Regrettably, our high taxation regime in the past eventually ended up encouraging tax evasion… The early decades after independence witnessed India with high taxation rates, prompting people to evade. The capacity of the state to detect evasion was less than adequate. Over the years, India has slowly started moving towards moderate rates of taxation,” he said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government was still committed to reducing the corporate tax rate to 25 per cent from the existing 30 per cent over the next four years, a promise Jaitley had made in his Budget speech. Jaitley went on to say that the government was well aware of the need to shift to a cashless economy.

“Being seized of this problem, the government has been working with various authorities in order to incentivise this change. The opening of a large number of payment gateways, internet banking, payment banks and the emerging reality of e-commerce will prompt the use of banking transactions and plastic money to rise significantly,” he wrote.

He said that the government was taking several other steps to curb black money transactions within India. “Our government is at an advanced stage in considering making it mandatory to provide PAN card details for cash transactions beyond a certain limit,” he said. “The monitoring regime of the income tax (department) has been strengthened and its ability to detect large cash withdrawals, or large cash transactions which enter the system, is being strengthened,” he said.