18.07.2007

• I have answered some of your shout-box queries in today’s Discover It blog. They were about hawala and money laundering, hedge funds, negative net worth and Web 2.0. Take a look at them here.
• Composition of the WPI
• The Wholesale Price Index comprises of three categories:
• Fuel, power and lubricants (14.23%)
• Manufactured products (63.75%)
• Primary articles (22.02%)
• The figures mentioned in the brackets are their weights in the index.
• Biometric PAN cards are on the anvil
• With a view to eliminate duplicate PAN cards, the government is coming out with biometric PAN cards. Fingerprints or retinal scans will be used to uniquely identify individuals applying for PAN cards.
• There are about 13 lakh duplicate PAN cards in the country.
• 360 degree profiling of tax payers
• It involves mapping of information gathered about tax payers through annual information returns regarding bank accounts, credit cards, mutual fund investment, purchase of property and share market to investigate tax evasion.
• Secretary of the Empower Committee of State Finance Ministers
• Satish Chandra
• How much do Post Offices make on selling small savings schemes?
• For selling NSCs, they make Rs. 33.27 per certificate, irrespective of value. They earn Rs. 117.89 per postal savings deposit, irrespective of the size of the deposit.
• What are invisibles? Some of you have asked me this question with reference to our forex earnings.
• Take a look at SSSA Aiyar’s article in today’s ET. He discusses how about $23 bn in India’s BoP account remain unexplained by RBI.
• Let’s keep a tab on the issue.
• Read the article here.
• What is Political Islam?
• In an interesting article Najeeb Mubarki explains this concept. He says that it is a modern reactionary movement. In its social, economic and political content, it is the result of an aborted project of modernization, and the decline of the secular nationalist movement which would have delivered this modernization, mainly in the Muslim countries in West Asia. This political Islam spans varied forces – the reformative flexibility of a Khatami in Iran, the stridency of Islamic Jihad in Palestine, the social/democratic credentials of Hamas, and even the tribal atavism of the Taliban.
• Home equity business
• The practice of offering loans against house property.
• This is different from a normal housing loan. When a bank offers loan against a freehold house, taking the house as security, it is called home equity business.
• This is highly developed in the US.