Once in a great kingdom, where traders from all far nooks made a treasure for living, the great king felt that these traders dealt their major part in black markets, and trading in their own secret ways to evict the taxes payable to the king’s treasury.
The worried king summoned an urgent meeting with his wise counsels and came up with a master plan. But before he implemented, he assured the traders, it’s all for good and the initial pain that might happen will all settle down within a month or two.
The king banned all transactions in gold and instead issued huge iron blocks with the equivalent value. What his counsel said was, “If the size of the coin is big, it won’t be easy to hide or transact in secrecy. And if it’s not gold, we can find where all our gold went”. And then came the king’s second reform, the “Gau Smrthi Dhan” or the GSD; the tailor-made tax system for the traders.
While the heavy iron blocks made the movement and availability of items for the traders hard, the tailor-made tax reform was fit for none. With traders gone and income succumbed the great kingdom of Chupran Maharaja fell.
Syam S Nair 