At a press meet held to make public the decisions of its 10th national convention that took place in Bhairahawa last week, PABSON´ newly elected president Rajesh Khadka said, “This tax is not only impractical and irrelevant but also against existing international practices.” He asserted that EST would deprive children of their right to education.
In what he termed a bid to maintain equity in education sector, then Finance Minister Dr Babu Ram Bhattarai had imposed five per cent EST two years ago. Amid ensuing uproars, the successive Finance Minister Surendra Pandey had lowered five per cent EST to one per cent.
Still unsatisfied, member schools of PABSON had announced to pay it only for deposition in a fund to be used for development of education sector, not as a tax to be collected in the state coffers. However, speculations are rife that the government is not collecting it in an educational development fund.
“We are paying income tax,” Khadka said. “The government can not impose another tax in the name of educational equity. He said that member schools are even ready to help ill-equipped community schools by all means in Karnali and other backward zones.
Bhattarai had floated the idea of EST. He had argued that the government could use EST to provide free education to underprivileged students in the Karnali zone.
“In our convention, not a single delegate was in favor of EST,” Khadka said. “So we are not paying it from the next year.” He said that the government would hopefully scrape EST through the next budget.
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