One of the main conditions of the IMF programme was introduction of proper income tax laws for agriculture income. This condition has been complied with, with the introduction of amended legislations in all provinces however for this discussion only those passed in the Punjab and Sindh have been used.

New law and rate increase

This writer has fully examined the Punjab Agricultural Income Tax (Amendment) Act, 2024 and the Sindh Agricultural Income Tax Act, 2025. After the review of these acts this writer is almost sure that legislators, including the Chief Ministers, have not seen these statutes. Or, if they have read them they are not interested in practical implementation.

The bigger tragedy is that no tax bar or chamber or association has talked about these statutes when over 70 percent of our population is engaged in agricultural activities. This means that as a nation, which is actually a gathering of people, we have decided that this is only the ‘tick the box’ exercise, not to collect revenue from such sources of income. There appears to be a method in the madness as it has been ensured that no tax is actually collected.

Before the two statutes the maximum rate of tax on agriculture income was 15 percent without any super tax if the income was above Rs 4.8 million. Under the new law both in Sindh and Punjab this rate has been increased to 55 percent (after including Super Tax at a certain level of income).

This means that there is an absolute increase in the rate of tax of 40 percent which is over 350 percent of the earlier rate. This does not make sense. I wonder if there would be very few examples in the world where such an increase has been made. This writer has the........

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