Prashant Joshi

I am going on a holiday and plan to carry up to $2,000. How much of this can I carry via a prepaid card? What are the other ways of carrying money, as I don't wish to carry too much cash in hand. Is traveller's cheque a better option?You can transfer the entire $2,000 via prepaid card, provided you have not exhausted your yearly permissible limit of $10,000. This limit is according to the Foreign Exchange Management Act. You should carry cash only for your emergency requirements, say 10-20 per cent of your total foreign exchange requirement, and the balance can be carried in the form of a prepaid card. A traveller's cheque is another option to carry foreign currency but it has a limitation of getting it exchanged through a bank overseas. A prepaid card is definitely a better option. It has wider acceptability in the form of Visa/Mastercard merchants and ATMs, compared with the limited acceptability of traveller's cheques. Further, a prepaid card is convenient and provides

Banking: Prashant Joshi

Business Standard

Recent improvements can be sustained through more reforms

Power gains

What the crash in company orders means for Budget projections

Don't assume a recovery

KEY DEVELOPMENTS* Of the top 10 airports (which served 126 million of the 162 million passengers in FY2012), five airports have already seen private investment and three others are in phases of redevelopment or developing a secondary airport. Eighty per cent of today's traffic will be covered by these developments

Budget 2013-14 Wishlist

Ever since Vajubhai Valaâ€™s portfolio changed from Gujaratâ€™s finance minister to Assembly speaker, he has been at his humorous best. Recently, chairing the state Budget 2013-14, Vala had had enough when allegations were hurled back and forth between the ruling party and the Opposition, stalling all House business. Eventually, he offered a solution of sorts. â€œLet us end this session peacefully today. Someday soon... we can have a â€˜free hourâ€™ for all you people just to throw allegations at each other,â€ he joked.

'Free hour' for insults

Law enforcers in India are well known for discriminating between people in power and those who are not. So, when they choose to apply the law uniformly, the occasion is worth noting. Recently, members of Parliament (MPs) from the Left parties held a protest outside Parliament House in support of the two-day nationwide bandh called by trade unions. One MP tried recording a video of the protests on his iPad. The security officer immediately stepped in and urged him to stop filming on grounds that only authorised media people were allowed to film inside the Parliament complex, and the MP duly obliged.

Equal before the law

The new Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (Irda) Chairman, T S Vijayan, appears to have worked hard to establish a rapport with employees at Irda headquarters in Hyderabad from the first day. Vijayan, who was earlier chairman of the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC), made sure that he met as many people in Irda as possible on the day he took charge. Insiders say Vijayan met almost everyone, including support staff, and everyone seemed happy to have such an approachable chairman. Of course, given his background in marketing at LIC, he could not have found it difficult to win over people.

Winning ways

Apropos the report â€œBanks eye high arbitrage profitsâ€ (February 20), the basic question is the objective of the Liquidity Adjustment Facility (LAF) at the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). If one understands it well, LAF is to even out deficits and surpluses in liquidity in the banking system, arising out of day-to-day operations. Any short-term access by banks of RBI, the lender of last resort, should be after they have exhausted all possibilities in the inter-bank market. But the central bank follows the Biblical dictum: â€œAsk and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to youâ€ (Matthew 7:7). Of course, it follows the international practice of not investigating the use of repos, as revealed by my enquiries with the central banks in Japan and the UK and the European Central Bank. Besides, I believe using the repo funds for normal business operations against which an advisory was issued by RBI a few years ago, banks are deploying the money i

Letters: Repo - No questions asked

Union Budget 2013-14 would be the most austere Budget unveiled in the recent history given Finance Minister P Chidambaramâ€™s promise to slash this yearâ€™s fiscal deficit to 5.3 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP), and the next yearâ€™s to 4.8 per cent. The challenge is to restore the aam aadmiâ€™s confidence in the economy over the episodic spike in prices of primary articles. The government should place more emphasis on economics rather than politics if it wishes to control inflation. Corruption and the Congressâ€™ complicit silence over a battery of scams are the other bugbears of the ruling government. Chidambaram needs to electrify the capital markets and enthuse investors. Some measures, such as rolling back the Alternate Minimum Tax, need to be adopted. The payment of the advance tax by small and medium enterprises should be made flexible with the option to pay taxes during the following quarter, in order to avoid penalties and high interest rates. Regulatory su

Letters: Budget hype and hope

A price index for agri commodities: A Business Standard and Indicus Analytics initiative

Indicus price monitor

Within hours of reports that Tescoâ€™s all-beef hamburgers contained 30 per cent horse meat, the internet was bombarded with jokes. Here is a selection: Iâ€™m so hungry, I could eat a horse... I guess Tesco just listened; Anyone want a burger from Tesco? Yay or neigh?; Tesco are now testing all their vegetarian burgers for traces of unicorn; Tesco now forced to deny presence of zebra in burgers, as shoppers confuse bar codes for serving suggestions; To beef or not to beef. That is equestrian; A cow walks into a bar. Barman says, â€œWhy the long face?â€ Cow says â€œIllegal ingredients, coming over here stealing our jobs!â€; I hear the smaller version of those Tesco burgers make great horse dâ€™oeuvres.

Horsing around at Tesco's

Every Monday, Business Standard analyses one familyâ€™s financesand suggests a suitable way forward

Case study

Does one have to pay tax on switching between two equity funds?Yes, one has to pay a capital gains tax of 15 per cent if the switch happens in less than a year. This is also applicable if the switch is between two schemes of the same fund house. A switch from one scheme to the other is deemed a withdrawal.Will this switch attract exit load as well?Yes, exit load is applicable on switching. However, most firms don't impose any, if you switch from one plan to the other of the same fund house, even if the switch is happening within the exit load applicability period (example, switch from a dividend plan to a dividend reinvestment plan).

Tipping point

Tatas' return to civil aviation means more competition

Finally airborne

Privatising poorly run state-owned banks made more sense

Not the obvious solution

Kingfisherâ€™s Vijay Mallya and AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes have been competitors for sometime now. Not just in the air with their airlines, though the formerâ€™s has nosedived in the recent months, but also on the Formula One track: Mallya runs the Force India F1 team, along with Saharaâ€™s Subrata Roy, while Fernandes has Caterham (formerly Lotus). However, there is seemingly some lack in sporting spirit between the flamboyant beer baron and the Malaysian maverick. Asked a couple of years ago, on whether Fernandes had spoken to Mallya (about entering Indian aviation, among others), the straight-spoken former accountant cheekily replied that it was nearly impossible to catch the latterâ€™s attention if you didnâ€™t look like a super model. Wonder whoâ€™s watching who now!

Role models

In the just started Budget session, Bharatiya Janata Party leader and one of Parliamentâ€™s senior-most members L K Advani was among the few who made it a point to greet other senior leaders cutting across party lines in the Central Hall of Parliament. Officials covering the function said Congress President Sonia Gandhi and other senior leaders of the ruling party, including Veerappa Moily and Jaipal Reddy, stood up to acknowledge Advaniâ€™s greetings, but Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal and Coal Minister Sriprakash Jaiswal chose to give him the cold shoulder.

Cold shouldered

Apropos Nitin Desaiâ€™s article â€œWhat the FM must doâ€ (February 21), his argument on tax progressivity suffers from an isolationist approach since any other aspect of income tax, except progressivity, has not been considered. Progressivity of tax is not an end in itself. The objective is to promote growth and equity, and on these, the score of a highly progressive income tax is not impressive. To argue that Indiaâ€™s richest individual who receives more than Rs 1,000 crore as dividend to pay tax at the same rate as a pensioner who gets a few thousand rupees is against the principle of tax progression is more emotional than rational from the economic point of view.This argument has recently been nicknamed the Buffett Rule. Warren Buffett famously said his personal assistant paying at the same rate as him was unfair. But, in economic parlance, fairness is understood as what is better for the economy as a whole. Even after Buffettâ€™s statement, US President Obama has not

Letters: Tax equity vs tax growth

This refers to the editorial â€œCalling on New Delhiâ€ (February 21). French President Hollandeâ€™s unhyped visit to India is significant in more ways than one. A stagnant French economy ought to look up to India â€” which is far better placed, despite languishing at a growth rate of five per cent. His ministersâ€™ visits to Bangalore,Â Chennai and Mumbai for better trade relationships in education, manufacturing and entertainment, respectively, speak about their seriousness of interest in our economy. He has far tougher tasks at hand at his home turf, but then, at the same time, he cannot ignore an economy like India that can bring a lot of investment to his country.Bal Govind  NoidaLetters can be mailed, faxed or e-mailed to:The Editor, Business StandardNehru House, 4 Bahadur Shah Zafar MargNew Delhi 110 002Fax: (011) 23720201E-mail: letters@bsmail.inAll letters must have a postal address and telephone number

Letters: India's French role

In his State of the Union address, US President Barack Obama said America no longer needed to deploy tens of thousands of troops to occupy nations or meet threats from new extremist groups. The US defence budget contains hundreds of billions of dollars for new generations of aircraft carriers, stealth fighters and tanks that even the army says it doesnâ€™t need (Click on graphic)

Arms and the US

In the past two decades, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has allowed formation of 12 new banks. The guidelines on entry of new banks that were issued in January 1993 and were revised in 2001. On Friday, RBI released a new set of norms to allow creation of more banks. Here is a brief comparison of the guidelines issued in 1993, 2001 and 2013 (Click on graphic)

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