New Delhi, Feb. 14 -- A new income tax bill was finally placed before Indian lawmakers in Parliament on Thursday. This proposed law significantly cuts down the current legislation's text, reduces its number of sections and tries to simplify its language.

Terms like "assessment year" and "previous year" have been replaced with "tax year" and "financial year", respectively, for example. This has been done to make these terms easier to understand. Similarly, its content has been re-ordered to improve the law's coherence and thereby ease its comprehensibility, something which numerous tweaks over the decades had turned into a challenge even for experts.

This was a state of affairs crying out for attention. As a matter of natural justice, an...