Gulati Institute of Finance and Taxation (GIFT) here will host Kenyan Revenue Allocation Commission looking for guidance in decentralised planning.
D. Narayana, director, GIFT, told Business Line that the Kenyan team is seeking to learn from successful decentralisation models in Brazil, Ghana and India.
INDIAN LEG
It is the Indian leg of its tour that would take the team to Kerala and GIFT, Narayana said. During a stopover in Delhi, it will visit the office of Union Revenue Secretary, Planning Commission and National Institute for Public Finance and Policy.
As part of the decentralisation exercise being tried out in its country, the Kenyan Commission had proceeded so far as to allocate funds but courted trouble midway.
This forced it to have a rethink on the basic devolution formula, travel around the world to get a lowdown on successful models implemented elsewhere.
The Kenyan team will be at GIFT in the evening of December 5; the next day, they will be treated to two sessions in the forenoon.
TWO SESSIONS
The first will deal with the structure of decentralisation in Kerala while the second will dwell on State Finance Commission and the devolution formula. In the afternoon, the team will be taken to a nearby grama panchayat and a municipality where it will hear out functionaries of respective local bodies.
The team will later travel to Kollam to interact with cashew and coconut sectors. Kenya is home to export-oriented agro-processing industries.
NEW COURSE
Separately, Narayana said GIFT will launch an integrated five-year BA LLB programme in finance and taxation.
This is sought to be done in partnership with National University of Advanced Legal Studies (NUALS), Kochi, which would award the degree.
The final syllabus meeting will be held here on Wednesday, and the syllabus will be forwarded to the academic council of NUALS for approval.
Taxation law is a largely neglected topic in law universities; this is despite the fact that it has assumed vital significance in the context of epochal changes in taxation regime from sales to value-added to goods and services tax.
“GIFT has resident experts on economics, taxation, accountancy, among others, so we thought why not think of a course along these lines,” Narayana said.