``No matter how rich or poor one may be, now you neither can escape the tax bracket nor this punishment of standing for over four hours at Marine Drive just because you happen to be a good citizen who wants to file in the returns by June 30,'' added an exasperated Duggal. Even as I-T officials extended the time limit upto midnight for accepting the returns, thousands of working professionals could be seen standing in queues that never seemed to end to hand in their forms.

Said the Mumbai Chief Commissioner of Income Tax (II), KVM Pai, ``The I-T building at Charni Road is not convenient enough to cater to such a rush as its entrance is very narrow. We do feel bad to see tax-payers standing for so long in hot and humid conditions, which is why we have moved a proposalto shift our office at another site.''

Pai admitted that the department had been taken aback this year by the sheer number of tax payers, five times higher than recent years. According to Pai, the number of tax assessees two years back was merely a lakh, but has now risen to 5.81 lakh due to the widening of the tax bracket.

But the man in the line is taking none of this. ``Why can't they open several counters, or better still divide the load on a region wise basis in the city? In fact, in today's cyber age, authorities could very well have accepted the forms on the Internet, that would have been the easiest,'' said a chartered accountant, Usha Ghelani.

While an elderly woman was seen shouting at the authorities after an arduous three-hour wait, another harried tax payer commented: ``This is total mismanagement by the IT department. It is ironic that it had to happen in the commercial capital of the country. My whole day has ben spent just in this.''

The I-T department does have a solution in mind, butit won't materialise in this millennium. ``Within three years we will computerise the entire I-T sector so that people can directly send in their returns via high-tech computer networks, like in advanced countries. We have already signed an agreement with the government of Canada for this purpose,'' informed Pai.