From your desk to the FM - KarSetu

There is a particular kind of satisfaction — quiet, almost private — that comes from watching something you crafted at your own desk travel all the way up and enter the public domain at the highest level. On 20th March 2026, the Hon'ble Finance Minister of India, Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman, released Kar Setu — the eBook and booklet on Interplay and Transition FAQs from the Income Tax Act, 1961 to the Income Tax Act, 2025.

What Kar Setu Is

India is undergoing one of the most significant legislative transitions in its fiscal history. The Income Tax Act, 1961 — a statute that governed the tax lives of every Indian for over six decades — is being replaced by the Income Tax Act, 2025. This is not a cosmetic rewrite. It is a restructuring of 536 sections, affecting over 700 field offices, tens of thousands of tax officers, and millions of taxpayers and practitioners across the country.

The question that every officer in the field, every chartered accountant advising a client, every taxpayer filing a return would inevitably ask is: What changes? What stays? What do I do differently starting April 2026?

Kar Setu was built to answer that question.

The name itself — Kar Setu, a bridge of duty — was chosen deliberately. This is not a commentary or an academic paper. It is a bridge. A structured, FAQ-based guide that maps the interplay between the old Act and the new, so that the transition is navigable rather than bewildering.

The Four Months Behind It

What the public sees today is a finished product — clean, structured, authoritative. What they don't see is the four months that preceded it.

Sixteen sub-committees were constituted to cover every major area of the Act. Each committee comprised officers who live and breathe these provisions daily — assessment, appeals, penalties, TDS, international taxation, search and seizure, and more. The coordination happened out of the Directorate of Organisation and Management Services (DOMS), CBDT, where I serve as Member Secretary to the Guidance Note Committee for the ITA 2025 implementation.

There were drafts. Many drafts. There were rounds of review where a single FAQ would be debated, reworded, cross-referenced, and debated again. There were late-night iterations where you are staring at Section 247 of the new Act and tracing its lineage back to Section 143(3) of the 1961 Act, making sure the transition guidance is precise enough that a young ITO in a mofussil town can rely on it.

This is the unglamorous work of governance. No stage, no spotlight. Just a desk, a screen, and the knowledge that if you get this wrong, the confusion will cascade across the entire tax ecosystem.

Why This Matters Beyond Tax

I have spent fifteen years in the Indian Revenue Service. I have done transfer pricing investigations, ITAT litigation, international tax advisory, and policy work. I have studied at Columbia and Harvard, advised at the UN, and consulted for the G20. But I will say this plainly: there is something uniquely grounding about building a document that will be used by an Assessing Officer in Dharwad and a Senior Partner at a Big Four firm in Mumbai on the same day, for the same purpose.

Kar Setu is a leveller. It doesn't distinguish between the officer who needs it to process a case and the practitioner who needs it to advise a client. It serves both. That is what public goods are supposed to do.

In an age where we talk endlessly about AI in governance, digital transformation, and technology-led reform, it is worth remembering that sometimes the most impactful thing a government can produce is a well-structured document that answers the right questions clearly. Not an app. Not a dashboard. A document — researched, debated, refined, and released.

The Moment

When the Finance Minister releases something you have been working on for months — something that started as a working file on your desktop, went through committee after committee, was revised at 11 PM on a Thursday, and finally emerged as a polished eBook — there is a moment. It is not dramatic. It is not cinematic. But it is deeply, quietly, satisfying.

You don't need anyone to tell you the work mattered. You know. Because you watched it travel from your desk to the hands of the person who stewards this country's fiscal policy. And now it is in the public domain, serving the people it was always meant to serve.

Kar Setu is live. The bridge is built.

Election Duty in Tamil Nadu

The alarm goes off at 4:30 AM in Girnar Guest House in Kaushambi. It is the 18th of March 2026. I have packed the night before. Three copies of my appointment letter. Six passport-size photographs. A hardbound diary. Blue pen, black pen, red pen. The red one, I suspect, will see the most use.

On my laptop, my phone, and a pen drive, there is a PDF I have been reading for two days. The Compendium of Instructions on Election Expenditure Monitoring, December 2024 edition. Five hundred and some pages. It is going to be my reference manual for the next forty-five days.

I have been following money trail in Income Tax. Today, I am going to follow money in a different place.

The Election Commission of India has appointed me as Expenditure Observer for the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly Elections, 2026. My constituency is 86-Edappadi, Salem District. 

My job is straightforward. Every candidate contesting this seat can spend a maximum of Rs. 40 lakh under Rule 90 of the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961. I am here to make sure that limit is respected. And to catch the spending that candidates would rather not declare: the cash, the liquor, the freebies, the vehicles that never make it into any register.

Different domain. Same discipline. Follow the money.

The flight leaves Delhi at 7:05 AM. I land in Bangalore by mid-morning and make my way to Salem by a connecting flight. The landscape changes as you cross into Tamil Nadu. The soil turns red. Granite quarries appear on hillsides. Steel plants. Sago factories. Roadside stalls selling tender coconut. The signboards switch to Tamil, a script I cannot read.

Salem is bigger and more industrial than I expect. Thirty lakh people live in this district. Eleven Assembly constituencies. One Lok Sabha seat. A steel plant, a river, a busy corporation. This is not a sleepy town. This is a serious place.

A blue-beacon Innova is waiting for me. My Liaison Officer, Thiru. Duraisamy, and my PSO, Thiru. Samuel, are standing beside it. In the grammar of Indian government, a blue-beacon vehicle is a statement. It says: the Election Commission is here. Word travels in a constituency. By evening, people in Edappadi will know that the Expenditure Observer has arrived.

That is by design.

Most people think of elections as rallies and speeches and ballot boxes. They do not think about what runs underneath.

India's election expenditure monitoring system is, quietly, one of the most ambitious real-time financial surveillance operations in any democracy. Flying Squads patrol highways at 3 AM, stopping vehicles and checking for cash. Static Surveillance Teams sit at junctions with cameras and logbooks. Video teams record every rally and public meeting so that someone can later count the chairs, measure the pandal, estimate the cost, and ask: did the candidate report this?

Check posts on every major road. An Election Seizure Management System that logs every seizure of cash, liquor, drugs, or freebies in real time. Shadow registers that track observed expenditure independently of what candidates declare.

And at the centre of this system, an Expenditure Observer in every constituency. 

I meet the police first. The Superintendent of Police, Salem.

We sit across a table and talk about money. Not money in the abstract. Cash movement corridors through the district. Drug transit routes that get repurposed during elections for distributing inducements. Liquor supply chains. The geography of how money and material flow into a constituency when an election is on.

We exchange phone numbers. That is the real deliverable of the meeting.

Then the Collector. District Collector and District Election Officer, Salem. 

She manages eleven constituencies simultaneously. She knows the machinery.

I also meet the Commissioner of Police. That is three institutional meetings in a single afternoon. Three sets of phone numbers saved. Three relationships established.

The foundation is being laid.

Then I leave Salem for Edappadi.

Forty-two kilometres west. The road passes through Tharamangalam. The landscape opens into the kind of small-town Tamil Nadu that runs on agriculture, granite, and local commerce. The Mettur Dam, one of the largest in India, sits at the edge of this constituency.

I arrive in the late evening. The temperature is 36 degrees. My accommodation is an Inspection Bungalow. 

I meet the Assistant Expenditure Observer and the Returning Officer's team. These are the people who will actually run the expenditure monitoring on the ground every day. Block-level officials. Taluk-level officers. People who know every lane in this constituency.

I explain the shadow register. This is the most important tool in my kit. A parallel ledger maintained independently by my team, recording every observed campaign activity and its estimated cost based on the DEO's rate charts. When a candidate declares they spent fifteen lakh and my shadow register shows thirty-five lakh of observed activity, that gap is where the questions begin.

I set up the daily reporting protocol with the AEO. Summary every evening by 8 PM. Seizures reported immediately. No delays. No filtering.

They save my number. I save theirs. And a whatsapp group is created.

Here is what I have learned on Day 1.

The machinery exists. The teams are being assembled. The infrastructure is taking shape. Salem district has a competent Collector, a sharp SP, and a police commissionerate that is engaged. At the constituency level, the AEO and RO team are in place.

Whether the machinery works under pressure is a different question. That is what the next four days are for. I will inspect check posts. I will visit Flying Squads in the field. I will meet State Excise officials. I will walk through the Expenditure Sensitive Pockets identified in this constituency. I will look at registers and formats and verify that the teams are not just formed on paper but actually functioning on the ground.

There is something I keep thinking about.

In tax administration, the stakes are revenue. Important, certainly. A nation runs on what it collects.

In election monitoring, the stakes are the process itself. Every rupee of unaccounted expenditure is a small crack in the integrity of a democratic exercise. Every cash envelope distributed to a voter is an attempt to convert a citizen's choice into a transaction. The expenditure monitoring system exists to hold that line.

I am not being dramatic about this. It is just a fact. The line holds because someone is watching. The observer is not only a checker of registers. The observer is a signal that someone is counting.

A note on language.

I do not speak Tamil. This is, to put it mildly, a limitation when you are posted in Tamil Nadu.

But I have discovered that vanakkam, said with folded hands and a genuine smile, opens every door. That nandri, said often, builds goodwill faster than any official letter. And that sari, meaning OK, meaning understood, meaning let us proceed, is the single most useful word in the working vocabulary of Indian governance.

My Liaison Officer, Thiru. Duraisamy, handles the rest with a patience I find remarkable. The block-level officials speak enough English that we get by. In government, the real language is not Hindi or Tamil or English. It is the language of registers, formats, reports, and deadlines. That language, I speak fluently.

It is late now. The ceiling fan turns. The night outside is warm and full of the sounds of a Tamil Nadu small town: insects, a distant temple speaker, the occasional auto-rickshaw.

I open my diary and write the day's observations. Four meetings. Two cities. One overnight transformation from a tax officer in Delhi to an election observer in a constituency I had never visited before this morning.

I have four more days in this visit. Then back to Delhi for a week. Then back here on the 30th of March when the gazette notification drops. Then continuously from the 5th of April through polling day on the 23rd.

The work has begun.

Vanakkam, Tamil Nadu.