Making the company law easy

The Companies Act, 2013, which came into effect from April 2014, has seen scores of changes. Last week, a government-appointed committee proposed another set of 100-odd amendments. Tax and legal experts share with Business Standard their insights on the implications of the committee's key recommendations

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T N Ninan's idea of a Modi index in his piece published on February 6 is a novel and sound one because it will gauge India's real growth through proxy indicators, as the Li Index does in China, by considering credit, freight movement and electricity consumption as effective proxy indicators.India's tax collection is a good indicator; why not electricity consumption too? Investment intentions being translated into actual investments is notoriously hard to track, especially as time lag distorts the picture. We do need our own proxy indicators.But the writer overstates the case in saying, "we are treading water, not swimming forward in the direction and at the speed needed". Are we not really in slow forward breast-stroke, when a faster freestyle pace is attainable? Or is it that the Ninan-esque "Indian tortoise" (The Turn of the Tortoise) is not programmed for anything so energetic?Kishan S Rana, New DelhiLetters can be mailed, faxed or e-mailed to:The Editor, Business StandardNehru Hous

Letters: Effective indicators

With reference to the piece, "Government should make MGNREGA irrelevant" (February 5), the Congress while in power at the Centre, conceived rural welfare schemes and also devised a digital platform for transaction of assistance. It is a pity that political ineptness robbed the party credit on both counts.However, prolonged economic stasis in the country and around the world has pushed the 20-month-old Bharatiya Janata Party-led government into shedding its disdain for such social schemes to such an extent that it is now singing praises of those schemes.It is the duty of the party in power to protect pro-poor initiatives such as the MGNREGA. Such initiatives have led to higher wages for people in rural areas and these have risen faster against inflation since 2007-08. Insurance schemes that pave the path for optimising agricultural productivity, nodal processing systems and marketing, would in time ameliorate the distress of marginalised farmers.R Narayanan, GhaziabadLetters can be mail

Letters: Restore social schemes

With reference to the report, "GST may be delayed further as parties get poll-ready" (February 5), although the government has announced the schedule of Parliament's Budget session with high hopes of getting crucial Bills related to goods and services tax (GST), bankruptcy and real estate regulation passed, the mood of the Opposition leaders indicates that they would be sitting on the other side of the fence.The Opposition parties appear to be more concerned with their political fate in the Assembly elections in five states - West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry - later this year than in lending the central government a helping hand in passing pending Bills during the Budget session.If the Opposition parties divert their attention to the Assembly elections, that would be another instance of a democratic opportunity lost. Such a negative development would not augur well for the nation. After all, how long will the Indian economy have to wait and suffer before these repr

Letters: Travesty of democracy

A Bharatiya Janata Party candidate for an Assembly by-election in Madhya Pradesh has put up hoardings with photographs of himself, former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and a beaming Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. Curiously, neither Prime Minister Narendra Modi nor BJP President Amit Shah finds a place on the hoardings. In the run-up to the Bihar Assembly elections last year, only Modi and Shah were featured on the hoardings that the BJP erected across the state; photos of Bihar leaders of the BJP-led alliance were included as an afterthought, when the party sensed it was losing ground. The BJP and its allies were trounced in the state's Assembly elections. On Tuesday, only a few news channels showed live visuals of Modi's public meeting in Coimbatore; a few months back almost all the channels were showing him live.

Not the flavour of the moment

A report in an English language newspaper claimed that the Indian government had tried to strike a deal with a foreign government on a sensitive issue. It said the discussions were held at the highest levels of the two governments. It also quoted the spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) calling the claim "ridiculous". Neither the MEA nor the Prime Minister's Office issued a clarification or a rejoinder after the report was published. Their argument: Any clarification/rejoinder will only fuel speculation. Sources in the MEA said it had stopped issuing clarifications to "inaccurate" reports. Instead, it lets journalists, who might be keen on following up on such reports, know that it considers such reports to be the "figment of the imagination" of some of their peers.

A figment of the imagination?

Regulation of domestic work needs careful design

A regulatory frontier

Govt should revamp agricultural marketing to increase farmers' earnings and amend land-leasing laws

Agriculture has high hopes from this Budget

The extra revenue mobilised through the hikes should be used by the govt to ramp up its capital expenditure

Raising excise on petrol, diesel is a good move

Mixed signals

The domestic MF sector's AUM climbed to record levels in the December quarter

If you want to make it big in Bollywood, you should perhaps head to Uttar Pradesh and seek the blessings of Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav. At the Saifai Mahotsav last week, Yadav said that when Hindi film actor Priyanka Chopra was a student in Bareilly, her father was posted in the Army and he (Yadav) was the defence minister. Yadav had blessed her and said that one day, she would become "a top heroine" in Bollywood. "My blessing helped her become what she is today," Yadav added.

Yadav's blessings

On Tuesday, the automobile industry sought relief from the Supreme Court to sell diesel passenger vehicles (with engine capacities of 2,000 cc and above) in the National Capital Region (NCR). As a lawyer argued that diesel cars were but a "small" source of air pollution, the judge promptly asked if they were known to emit "oxygen". The apex court had banned the registration of such vehicles on December 16 last year. On Monday, the Supreme Court said the ban on the sale and registration of diesel vehicles with engine capacities of 2,000 cc and above in the NCR would continue till March 31.

Dealing with diesel

While some sections of Delhi's daily commuters are eager to see the odd-even vehicle plying scheme, which kicked off on January 1 for a 15-day trial run, come to its logical end, at least one company says it is hopeful about the future of such an initiative. In a statement, Ola, a mobile app-based cab hailing service, says, "We are optimistic about initiatives like car/cab-pooling and the ongoing odd-even experiment contributing to a pollution-free Delhi in times to come." The note also mentions that there has been a "double-digit growth in demand" for Ola's vehicles this week over that of last week in the National Capital Region.

Formula for success

With reference to the editorial, "Time for Pak to give answers on Pathankot" (January 5), there is little doubt that "once the counter-terror operation at the Indian Air Force base in Pathankot is well and truly over, questions will and must be asked and answered about how it was handled". The question is: Despite the fact that we had specific intelligence input, how did such a large group of terrorists sneak into the heavily-guarded Pathankot air base? More so, when the elite Special Protection Group, too, had been deployed by the government? This calls for taking a holistic view of our operational preparedness in such situations. Could the multiplicity of security agencies involved in countering the attack have delayed the taking of action against the terrorists?However, the most important aspect of the Indian operation was the inept handling of news, both by the government and the news channels. Several TV channels made a mockery of themselves by flashing "breaking news" of the numb

Letters: Inept handling

With reference to the interesting piece, "Why freight moves so slowly on Indian roads" (January 5), it is remarkable that the writer, Akshat Kaushal, travelled from Gurgaon to Panvel to understand what ails freight movement in the country. I suggest he now travel from Kolkata to Mumbai or Kolkata to Bengaluru; he will find more reasons for the slow movement of goods in India. Even in the case of transportation of vegetables and fruits there appears to be little consideration -most of these go to waste on the way.India cannot afford to lose precious perishable food due to poor management of the much-criticised infrastructure, in particular roads, and bribery. Tomatoes and bananas were both selling for Rs 5 a kg in areas outside Bengaluru last month even as their prices in the rest of the country were much higher. Lack of both transport and reasonable support prices made farmers near Bengaluru destroy their produce. It is a shame that farmers in the Mysuru region were offered only Rs 2 p

Letters: Clearing the roadblocks

Govt should also ask itself whether its handling of the news about the attack is up to the mark

Time for Pak to give answers on Pathankot

China is ahead of us on several parameters like spending on R&D and patent applications filed

India needs to catch up on R&D

The Rashtriya Janata Party's (RJD) stellar performance in the Bihar Assembly polls has increased headaches for the party brass. To start with, the increase in the number of office-bearers has made it necessary to revamp the RJD office at 2, Beer Chand Patel Marg in Patna. Party chief Lalu Prasad has ordered that the office be renovated to hold bigger programmes; the first priority is to construct a 1,500-seat meeting hall on its premises. The construction work for the makeover is expected to start soon.

Need for a makeover

Is the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) in West Bengal ready to extend an olive branch to the Congress? At a programme to mark 50 years of the CPI-M mouthpiece, Ganashakti, the party's state secretary, Surjya Kanta Mishra, urged people to fight the Trinamool government "together", irrespective of "the political flag" they held. Politburo member Biman Bose echoed similar sentiments. He said the CPI-M had failed to bring the Left Front and secular parties outside it on to a common platform. "I call upon all of them to join us in fighting this government," he said.

Left-Congress bhai-bhai?

The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology announced the launch of a number of apps to promote its Digital India campaign at the launch of the Good Governance Week. The two-and-a-half-hour event was running smoothly till it was time for minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to present the awards to states/districts that had performed extremely well in areas related to the Digital India initiative. At some point during the event, the certificates to honour the various awardees got mixed up, prompting the organisers to only hand out the trophies. The organisers had to request the winners to stay back after the event and contact ministry officials to get the correct certificates.

A mix-up

Apropos the report, "Retrospective tax laws scared investors away, says Jaitley" (January 3), while the government may be legally competent to levy retrospective taxes, such taxes are morally illegitimate.Apart from retrospective taxation, what hurts investors as well as Indian taxpayers is the manner in which revenue officials exercise quasi-judicial powers in dealing with disputes. It is axiomatic that they are expected to be fair in their interpretation of the law, irrespective of the amount of money involved in a dispute. They are not expected to be revenue-biased, at least not recklessly. They are expected to act like judges. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's advice to them, "when in doubt, go straight (without leaning on either side)" is saying the obvious. He is only reminding them the hallmark of an ideal tax administration.However, the credibility of the officials in resolving disputes is strikingly low. What hurts taxpayers the most is that even in patently undeserving cases of

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