Indian Current Affairs: 17.06.2008

Winning a Grand Prix Lion at the Cannes advertising festival is a dream come true for any ad man in the world. This is considered as the advertising fraternity’s equivalent of the Oscars or the Grammy awards.
The Times of India’s Lead India campaign done by JWT has become the first-ever entry from India to win a Grand Prix Lion at this festival.

This concerns the income tax exemption for IT companies operating out of SEZs.
Under the SEZ Act, profits earned by the unit are 100% tax exempt in the first five years, and 50% tax exempt for the next five years. The 50% tax exemption can be extended for another five years based on the amount re-invested in the SEZ unit.
IT companies which have got a year’s respite on the extension of tax sops for STPI units are in for a surprise on the SEZ front. Already, TCS, Infosys Technologies and Wipro get some amount of their revenues from SEZs and continue to add new capacities in SEZs.
Under Section 10AA(1), which defines the benefits under SEZs, 100% of the export profits from the unit are tax exempt. But Section 10AA(7), which defines how these profits will be computed, says that the profits from the SEZ unit are to be multiplied by the ratio of the export sales from the unit to the total turnover of the assessee. In other words, if a company has a turnover of Rs 10,000 crore and if it does Rs 5,000 crore of exports from the SEZ unit leading to a profit of Rs 1,000 crore from the unit, the entire Rs 1,000 crore will not be tax exempt. Only 50% of Rs 1,000 crore (where 50% is the export sales of the unit as a percentage of the company’s total turnover) or Rs 500 crore will be exempt. This significantly reduces the tax exemption the company can get on profits from SEZs at least in the initial years, when a greater percentage of their exports come from outside of SEZ units.

Look at this figure; it details how the government proposes to handle the fuel subsidy issue, albeit in a surreptitious way.

Know anything about nostro accounts and vostro accounts? These terms are used in banking

How big or small is our debt market, when compared with the markets in other countries? Or as a proportion of our GDP?

It is a landmark case dating to 1967 in which the US supreme court struck down laws against interracial marriage. Mildred Loving, died on May 2 this year, her husband Richard having died back in 1975. She was a coloured person married to a white man.

Speaking of marriages, I know you can very well guess that homosexual marriages are banned in India. Right? But what section of the IPC (Indian Penal Code) proscribes them?

Crashing asteroids or volcanic eruptions are believed to have wiped out dinosaurs 65-million years ago and caused other mass extinctions. But a new study suggests that there have been other culprits as well, most notably the gigantic ebb and flow of oceans.
Since life appeared on earth 3.5-billion years ago, it is believed as many as 23 mass extinctions took place. During the past 540-million years, five well-documented extinctions wiped out the bulk of marine plants and animals species. In case of dinosaurs, a crater suggests they were wiped out as the result of a large asteroid crashing into the planet. But the causes of other mass extinctions have been murky, at best — scientists have been unable to pin down the exact causes.

Look at this article about Austria’s topless female football players beating Germany in beach football.

Indian Current Affairs