Apni Party senior Vice President Ghulam Hassan Mir on Friday expressed concern over the ill-planned and badly executed e-stamping process which has snatched livelihood of over 28,000 families across Jammu and Kashmir.
In a statement, Mir observed that thousands of families in J&K have been hit hard by the introduction of e-stamping initiative as the local stamp vendors whose income solely depended on the sale of stamps have been rendered jobless. “While the e-stamping process is a need of the hour because of the technological advancement which provides a secure and tamper proof mechanism that can prevent scams and leakages and stop revenue losses, the government should have safeguarded the livelihood interests of the local stamp vendors before switching over to the electronic stamping project,” Mir said.
He said the policy planners should have involved local stamp vendors in the e-stamping as most of them were in this field since decades and cannot adopt or do any other businesses.
“Many educated unemployed youth were earning a living to run their families by stamp vending and had invested their time and money in this business. Now e-stamping has left them high and dry and they are not even able to pay the school fee of their children,” he said. Mir said many stamp vendors who were exclusively performing job of stamp vending and could hardly extract their livelihood out of it have now crossed the age bar to apply for any government jobs. “The J&K government should have thought out about these hapless families before appointing an outside company to act as stamp duty collection authority for the implementation of e-stamping procedure,” he said.
Mir said involvement of banks in this field will definitely deprive the families of stamp vendors of their earnings and hence the government must revisit its stamp duty policy.