THE CITU has registered strongest protest over the NDA government’s budget proposal to tax workers’ accumulations in the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) and demanded its complete withdrawal immediately. The finance minister has proposed to tax 60 percent of the accumulations in EPF at the time of withdrawal. Till now, the EPF accumulations are exempted from the tax net. The argument given is that, this is being done to put the savings in NPS and EPF on par. To achieve this, the government wants to exempt 40 percent of NPS accumulations, which are now fully taxed and tax 60 percent of EPF accumulations, which are not taxed till now. The all-out opposition to this proposal, including from some sections of government’s supporters, has brought out different clarifications from the people at the helm of affairs, exposing the confusion in the government. Those following the government’s policy formulations on social security schemes like EPF, ESI etc, can see a running thread of pushing all the savings of workers to the market. In the budget speech last year, the finance minister declared that ‘both EPF and ESI have hostages, rather than clients’. He proposed that the EPF subscribers should be given an option to switch over to National Pension Scheme, a market linked pension scheme. In the case of ESI, the option was to switch over to medical insurance policies. The CITU and all other central trade unions had opposed these proposals and these could not be implemented so far. Later, the government forced 5 to 15 percent of EPF funds to be invested in the stock market, despite the strong opposition by worker representatives in the Central Board of Trustees as well as by all the central TUs. The CITU has pointed out that the present proposal of the NDA government is in continuation of all these. It is part of the agenda of the international finance capital, to loot all the sections of Indian people. Through these proposals for taxation, the government is also trying to tax the workers twice, the section of workers who are already paying their income tax. This is being done when the same government is providing all sorts of exemptions and concessions to the corporates. Strongly demanding immediate withdrawal of these proposals, the CITU has called upon the working people to raise their voice of protest against these unjust proposals of snatching away their life long savings.