- Savings bank accounts may get tax sops
- The Ministry of Finance is considering:
- Tax exemption on interest income on fixed deposits up to Rs. 15,000
- Tax exemption on interest accrued on savings accounts
- Raising the TDS limit to Rs. 10,000 from Rs. 5,000 at present.
- Excise duty on cars
- Small cars suffer an excise duty of 16% and the rest of the cars are subject to 24% duty.
- Small car is one which is of 4 metres in length or less. The government is now considering revising this to 3.8 meters.
- The demand to change the small car specifications is the brainchild of the Auto Policy of 2002.
- Videocon takeover of Daewoo
- The Koreans have opposed Videocon’s bid following concerns of technology leaks and opposition over the migration of technology to
- Presidential assent to OBC quota
- The Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Bill, 2006 received the Presidential assent on 04.01.2007.
- The act provides for
- Reservation in admission to students belonging to the SCs, the STs and the OBCs, to central educational institutions established, maintained or aided by the central government.
- The act will not apply to
- Central educational institutions established in tribal areas referred to in the VI Schedule to the Constitution, such as the North Eastern Hill University, institutions of excellence, research institutions, institutions of national and strategic importance specified in the Schedule to this act and minority educational institutions, which have been exempted as per clause (1) of article 30 of the Constitution.
- The act requires that the institutions where the new quota regime comes into practice, do not reduce the number of seats that are available for general category students from the 2006 levels.
- Mining of
- Pakistan’s plan to fence and mine parts of the rugged 2,430 kilometer frontier with Afghanistan is seen as an attempt to fend off criticism that it does too little to stop Taliban and Al-Qaeda guerillas from crossing the border.
- The UN has voiced concern over the planned use of land mines.
- Afghan officials say militants operate from sanctuaries in
- Beer consumption in
- Andhra Pradesh, which is the largest guzzler, along with Tamilnadu, Karnataka and
- All
- Indian IT players double share in global ADM (Application Development and Maintenance) space
- During calendar 2005, the total contract value bagged by Indian IT service providers in the large ADM contract space was $1.3 billion, which is about 17% of the global pie.
- In contrast in the first 9 months of 2006, the figure is $1.1 billion or 26% of the market.
- The penetrate and radiate approach: The Indian companies usually use master framework agreements, which have small up-front contract values, but which allow them to compete and grow from the inside.
- Diamond trade and
- In the global diamond market, diamonds processed in
- Some quotes from Prof. C.K. Prahalad, the renowned management guru working at the
- “I think retailers are going to use extraordinary levels of IT to connect subsistence level farmers to national & global markets. This is going to transform our agriculture. Not more subsidies, more worries about irrigation, more fertilizers.”
- “Amul has 2.2 million farmers and processes 7 million kilograms of milk a day. It is the largest in the world.” It is a similar model; that of giving farmers an opportunity to get a fair price and eliminate middlemen, that would deliver results.
- “The solutions to
- Auto fuel doping to be made mandatory
- The government is working on a proposal to make blending more than 10% green fuel with petrol and diesel compulsory from 2017.
- Textile cess abolished
- The central government decided to abolish the textile cess on all readymade garments, with a view to boos the country’s garment industry.
- At present this cess is levied at the rate of 0.05% of the production value of the textile industry, and is used to fund the activities of the textile committee. This committee was constituted by an act of parliament to ensure quality of textile and textile machinery.
- Financing infrastructure: Alok Sheel
- Estimates put
- Government guarantees are a bad idea not only because of back-breaking contingent liabilities loaded onto a weak fisc, but because intrinsically unviable ‘white elephants’ (such as Enron) escape critical scrutiny of financiers.
- Winner’s curse: A tendency for the winning bid to exceed the intrinsic value of the item being auctioned, common in sealed bid auctions.
- Innovations such as LPVR (Least Present Value of Revenue) and Swiss Challenge, may eliminate the winner’s curse in project bids, but they would still need to keep within bankable thresholds.
- Swiss Challenge is one in which an unsolicited bid made by a private bidder is used by Government Client as the basis for an Open Competitive Bid, giving the proponent the chance to match the best offer, after the tendering process.
- ‘Present value’ is the discounted value of a future sum or stream of cash flows.
- Benefits of temp jobs
- What are the unintended consequences of current labour laws? Manish Sabharwal, the CEO of Teamlease a leading temp staffing company lists out the following:
- Exploding unorganized employment
- Capital substitution of labour
- Lower low-skill manufacturing jobs
- Blue collar exploitation
- Corruption
- Performance of our employment exchanges
- As against 4 crores registered unemployed last year, only about 1.3 lakhs were given jobs through them.
- Benefits of temporary jobs
- They are a non-fiscal market substitute for social security
- Temping increases the strategic flexibility of employers by lowering fixed costs and not total costs
- Challenges faced by retail sector
- Paucity of experienced manpower for mid-management positions.
- Recruiting senior people with significant retail experience is not an easy task.
- With about 350 malls expected to come up in the next three years, availability of retail space is another concern.
- While tier 2 cities represent an immense opportunity, infrastructure remains a major issue.
- Lack storage equipment such as racks, fixtures and shelves. Some of them are still being imported from abroad.
- Opportunities thrown up by retail
- It is expected to generate employment in excess of 20 lakh by 2010, of which 5 to 6 lakh employees will be needed in the organized sector itself.
- A typical retail space of 275 sq ft requires an employee. WalMart employs an employee per 300 sq ft.
- World’s leading car manufacturers on sales
- General Motors 24.6%
- Ford 17.5%
Showing posts with label Infrastructure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Infrastructure. Show all posts
05.01.2007
01.01.2007
- Centre may halve hardware excise
- As against a total taxation for IT and electronic products in
- Hence the Centre is considering reducing the excise duties on IT and electronics hardware
- IT industry readies a war chest of $3.7 billion for mergers and acquisitions
- In the first 10 months of 2006, the IT industry had entered into M&A deals worth $2.05 billion when compared with $1.3 billion during the previous year.
- Paswan takes on pharmas with cost-based pricing
- The Union Minister for Chemicals and Fertilizers has proposed to control the prices of 354 essential medicines by going into their cost of production.
- Currently, one-fourth of the Rs. 23,000 crore domestic pharmaceutical market is controlled.
- Investments in infrastructure
- Of the estimated $320 billion funding requirement for infrastructure in the 11th plan, about 20% is estimated to come from the private sector.
- Global potential of Indian tipple
- Many countries of the world are known for their distinctive liquors.
- In contrast
- R&D expenditure in the country
- According to IACC (Indo American Chamber of Commerce) the R&D expenditure in the country has reached $8.4 billion in 2005 and is growing at a CAGR of about 30%.
- IT market to log 21.5% growth this year
- The number of broadband users in the country is expected to touch 3.5 million by June 2007 and 5 million by the end of 2007.
- Difference between pre-launch and soft-launch in real estate
- Raising money from public for projects which are yet to get regulatory approval in the form of license and clearances is called pre-launch. In the case of soft-launch, the move follows only after receiving all the necessary approvals.
- Uranium exploration may be opened up in the country
- The government is set to open up production of uranium exploration and mining.
- Uranium deposit in Jaduguda (Jharkhand) was discovered in 1951 with the help of Associated Drilling Company of
- Beard of the Year Award
- Monty Panesar,
- Why is the quality of our institutions important? And how does it decline?
- If we are serious about becoming a global economic power, we need to focus on our soft infrastructure. By soft infrastructure we mean the entire gamut of governance, probity in public life, quality education and healthcare, gender, caste and communal equalities etc.
- As this is an area where we fair badly, this infrastructure can be improved only through an improvement in the quality of our institutions.
- When growth is more concentrated at the upper ends of the income spectrum (as it most definitely has been so far in India), there is the distinct possibility of the rich opting out of the public system and turning to private sector to get essential services (for example, gated communities with private policing, private generators for power, private schools for their children’s education etc.). The danger with this is that the normal pressures for improving the provision of public goods that one would ordinarily expect from higher incomes become noticeably absent. That is why the quality of institutions declines.
- Joseph Stiglitz, the 2001 winner of Nobel Prize for economics on intellectual property rights regime
- What is needed is an intellectual property regime that helps narrow the knowledge gap that separates developed from less developed countries – not one which reduces access to knowledge and denies access to life-saving medicines, but which, at the same time, provides little incentive for research in diseases that plague the developing countries.
- Disruptive power of technology
- K.V. Kamath, the CEO of ICICI Bank says that no where is the disruptive power of technology more evident than in the fact that the proportion of transactions in branches decreased from over 90% in 2000 to less than 25% in 2006. All because people have taken in a big way to technology driven transaction methods like ATMs, internet, phone banking and call centres.
- With the joining of these two countries, the strength of the EU rises to 27 and 493 million people.
28.12.2006
- Hutchison puts a floor price for its stake
- Hutchison has said that it will consider selling its 67% stake in Hutchison Essar for a price exceeding $14 bn. This is equivalent to Rs. 62,000 cr. This puts a valuation of $21 bn on the Cellular operator. It is considered very high.
- Meaning of humdinger
- someone of remarkable excellence; "a humdinger of a secretary"
- CBI files chargesheet in Khairlanji dalit carnage
- In this incident a mob killed the wife, daughter and two sons of dalit family in Khairlanji.
- The immediate provocation for the incident was that the wife and daughter duo had intervened in an altercation, one of their relatives had with one of the accused on non-payment of wages.
- The accused are all belonging to the OBC communities -- Kumbi and Kalar
- The Trinamul Congress Chief Mamata Banerjee’s fast unto death on Singur issue
- She had been on the fast for the last 24 days protesting against allotment of land by West Bengal government for Tata’s proposed car factory in Singur.
- The project was allotted a total of 997 acres of land, out of which the Trinamul Congress is contesting that 387 acres were forcibly taken from farmers.
- National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions is headed by Justice MSA Siddiqui.
- CBI files chargesheet against Jaya Jaitley in Tehelka sting case
- The reporters from Tehelka sought assistance from Jaitley to obtain orders for equipment from the defence ministry. In this connection Rs. 2 lakh was allegedly handed over to one Pancherwal at the instance of Ms. Jaitley. In the video footage secretly filmed by the Tehelka reporters, Ms. Jaitley wa shown saying that she would put in a word to “sahib’s office” if the firm was not considered.
- Discounts garnered by airlines from star hotels normally
- Airlines usually get about 40% discount on the rack rates from star hotels.
- Even in this supposedly lean season for Delhi hotels, the hotels are seen offering only about 30% discount as they have seen that there is huge demand for rooms caused due to flight delays on account of fog.
- Government to set up state internet exchange hubs
- It is proposing to set up these exchanges at Mohali, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad.
- Already we have four nodal exchanges at Noida, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata.
- Why do we need these exchanges?
- This is to avoid our internet traffic going all the way to the other side of the globe and coming back to us in India. For example, if a Yahoo mail user in Delhi sends an email to somebody in Mumbai, the data may be going all the way up to the US and then re-routed to Mumbai.
- There are 130 active ISPs in India and only 27 of them are connected to the NIXI – the national internet exchange of India.
- A tenth of rural India lives on Rs. 9 per day
- In spite of the superb growth seen in the economy, statistics from NSSO reveal that the villager at the bottom 10% pile of the rural population spent just Rs. 9 a day on his consumption needs, while his urban counterpart was slightly better off with Rs. 13 per day.
- Government may level ATF rates for foreign and domestic airlines
- The foreign airlines are not charged any taxes on ATF bought by them in India. But the Indian carriers are required to pay duties. The central excise is at 8% and the sales tax varies between 4% to 39% across states.
- In a bid to level the playing field between the foreign carriers and the Indian carriers flying to foreign destinations, the government is thinking of allowing a duty draw back for Indian carriers.
- “Let one hundred flowers bloom, let one hundred schools of thought contend” said Mao in 1958, in a bid to encourage constructive criticism. When the criticism did come, he swiftly exiled those who spoke too freely and too soon!
- What is scope creep? How can it be controlled or managed?
- It is phenomenon that causes users to be highly fickle about what they wish their software to do. Software engineers typically notice that there is a confusion in users about what they need and what they want.
- The methods that can be deployed to manage scope creep are:
- Employing the use case method to manage user requirements.
- Making the software development process more cyclical rather than linear.
- Making users play an active role in software evolution.
- Additionally two metrics are also suggested: Requirements clarity indicator and requirements stability indicator. The first one allows a panel of software experts to review a set of requirements early in the life cycle of the project and determine how well the stakeholders even understand what they want from their software. The second metric indicates the number of changes to the requirements and the amount of information needed to complete the requirements definition.
- The Rape of Nanking
- The Chinese city of Nanjing suffered a rampage of murder, rape and looting by Japanese troops in 1937 that became known as “The Rape of Nanking”, using the name by which the city was known in the West at that time.
- Historians generally agree that the Japanese army slaughtered at least 150,000 civilians and raped tens of thousands of women. China says that as many as 300,000 people were killed.
- China and Japan ordered a series of historical study groups in an effort to mend strained ties and reduce bitterness between the two countries.
- Tamilnadu to get two ultra mega power projects instead of one
- Tamilnadu is about to get two projects – one each at Cheyyur and Nagapatnam instead of one originally envisaged.
- E & P, gas pipelines to get infrastructure tag
- This getting of the infrastructure tag means that all incentives would be made available in terms of Section 19(23G) and 80 IA of the Incometax Act.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Loading...