Though media reports suggest the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati has her work cut out in the Assembly elections underway in her state, she has certainly made her presence felt among the young non-electorate. Or so team-Anna member and former police officer Kiran Bedi discovered recently. Travelling on the Aligarh-Mathura road she stepped out of her car to embrace children living in abject poverty &mdash; and found the welcome not so humbling. As Bedi appeared, the children ran to her saying, &ldquo;Mayawati has come.&rdquo; An embarrassed Bedi later said, &ldquo;It was probably my hair,&rdquo; referring to her short crop, which partially resembles the chief minister&rsquo;s.

Hair today

Business Standard

&ldquo;Automobile companies should be encouraged to establish manufacturing units in the country so that India becomes a manufacturing hub and turns into a net exporting nation. The stimulus offered to small and big cars should be retained. The price of diesel should be deregulated, but target groups should continue to get it at subsidised rates.

Chamber speak: D S Rawat

&ldquo;The biggest dampener could be higher tax on diesel vehicles. There is a misconception that if diesel tax goes up, sales of petrol vehicles will rise. If Cenvat is raised to 12 per cent, it will pave the way for GST, which will be a growth driver. Besides, the amount allocated for electric and hybrid vehicles would determine how serious the government is about promoting R&amp;D in the segment.

Industry speak: Pawan Goenka

Both these options can be exercised by an investor to invest in any asset class. However, I think you are referring to investment in equity mutual funds. You are correct in your statement that a lump sum investment enables one to invest a larger amount for a longer period of time. However, what if the time you chose to make that lumpsum investment was near a cyclical market peak, as seen in January 2008, or a bottom as seen in October 2008? In the first case, you may still be sitting on a loss, whereas in the latter you may be enjoying huge profits. On the other hand, had you invested in equity mutual funds through SIP, you would probably be somewhere in between.

Investing: Rishi Nathany

&ldquo;The healthcare industry was granted the infra status in the last Budget. But, the benefits to accrue to the industry have yet to be spelt out. Given the slow gestation period of new hospital projects in Tier-II and -III cities, the tax holiday should be extended to 10 years. This could also be extended to hospitals upgrading their facilities and adding new clinical service lines.

Expert speak: Rana Mehta

&ldquo;Improvement of health should be made a national agenda. The sector should be given priority. There is no need for subsidies, but a stimulus by the way of infra push or priority status to the sector is required. We also need to double the number of doctors, triple the number of nurses and increase paramedics four times.

Industry speak: Prathap C Reddy

&ldquo;The sector faces significant challenges and should be treated as an infrastructure industry for tax exemptions. The Budget should allow all expenditure related to research at in-house facility to be eligible for weighted deduction, even if these activities are carried outside the approved R&amp;D facility. There should be adequate allocation and incentives for setting up new medical institutes and colleges.

I bought a unit-linked insurance plan (Ulip) last year around January.

Life Insurance: Deepak Sood

A recent report of the Global Wind Energy Council exposes India&rsquo;s modest performance vis-&agrave;-vis more green energy-conscious nations in using wind as a renewable source of power. The fresh addition to wind energy capacity in India in 2011 was merely 3,000 megawatts (Mw), which compares very poorly indeed with China&rsquo;s 18,000 Mw &mdash; and is just a fraction of the 41,000 Mw capacity created globally.

In the shade

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee&rsquo;s task in drafting this coming Budget is unenviable. He has to balance growth-enhancing measures with a move back to fiscal sustainability. While there are differences about details, there is a surprising degree of consensus among observers on the broad features of the approach he should take. He will have to transform India&rsquo;s creaking, leaking, overreaching subsidy regime; he will have to push for more reform across sectors; and he will have to broaden the tax net and roll back the tax cuts introduced after the global financial crisis in 2008. Yet not everybody in India Inc seems to agree to this approach. Or that, at least, seems to be the thrust of recent statements from industry organisations. The pre-Budget memorandum from the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), for example, agrees that fiscal space is limited. Yet it goes on to demand exemptions for industry from this agenda.

Time for good sense

Everyone in the country is aware of income tax, but very few people know about central excise duty, Central Board of Excise &amp; Customs Chairman S K Goel thinks. &ldquo;The common man calls it central exercise&hellip; I say income tax is paid mainly by rich people, but everyone pays central excise without even knowing it,&rdquo; he said at the Central Excise Day celebrations recently. This may not be an inaccurate description: with excise collections dwindling in the recent times it is actually becoming an &ldquo;exercise&rdquo; for the CBEC to maximise revenues.

Central 'exercise'

&ldquo;In the midst of decelerating economic growth, high inflation and dwindling investments, industry has many expectations from the Union Budget 2012-13. Among other things, industry expects the government to further enhance infrastructure investment, check fiscal deficit, channelise large pool of domestic savings into infrastructure and give policy directions to re-build investors&rsquo; confidence.

Chamber speak: Rajiv Lall

This refers to T N Ninan&rsquo;s column &ldquo;A fully taxed nation&rdquo; (February 25). Increasing tax revenue seems to be the Centre&rsquo;s responsibility. That is why state governments are always complaining about the Union government usurping the power to tax but ironically they also want more central funds to meet their requirements. With regard to the introduction of the goods and services tax (GST), the opposition-ruled states may have some genuine grievances but they have shown little pragmatism and maturity in handling the issue. As a result, the introduction of the GST has been unnecessarily delayed and that is not good for the country&rsquo;s fiscal health.

Letters: Taxing problems

Social networking seems to have become the buzzword for the government&rsquo;s new media blitz to highlight its achievements. After putting the Prime Minister&rsquo;s Office on Twitter, officials said the focus now would be on training senior information officers on the benefits of new media and how to use it to disseminate information effectively. To this end, a meeting of Press Information Bureau officials was recently held in the capital at which the topic of social networking was reportedly discussed thoroughly. At the very least, we can expect SMSes in place of the clunky press releases.

govt@newmedia.com

Apropos &ldquo;A fully taxed nation&rdquo; (February 25), I found the piece informative but weak in its arguments. The author breaks up GDP into two parts &mdash; GDP of the formal economy that is generated by tax payers and an informal economy GDP that is generated by low-income individuals who don&rsquo;t pay tax. This leads to the assumption that a sizable portion of GDP is generated by the informal economy (and non-payers). Are we not mixing things up here? In poor countries, non-payers make up almost the entire population, but the informal economy in itself constitutes a near-negligible fraction and cannot serve as a valid basis to expect a lower tax-to-GDP ratio from poorer nations.

Letters: Ratio analysis

I have been reading the Budget updates and opinions of various industrialist in Business Standard for the past week. One issue worth highlighting is the service tax administration. Service tax refunds to technology parks and export-oriented units, as promised in the policy, are hard to come by. The department collects returns and documents certificates for all refunds claims but does not process them. Most claims are rejected even if the documentation is complete, and companies constantly have to file appeals. Corruption is open and rampant. Unless the department&rsquo;s terms are agreed to, no refunds are available for legitimate claims. In such an inefficient environment, how can industries function? With all this, if India is able to grow at 7.5 per cent or more, one has to applaud the patience and perseverance of the people in this country.

Letters: Taxing service

The editorial &ldquo;Let it fail&rdquo; (February 23) explains how any attempt to bail out Kingfisher Airlines is bereft of economic merit. As the comparative study of the management styles of IndiGo and Kingfisher also pointed out in &ldquo;A tale of two airlines: Kingfisher vs IndiGo&rdquo; (February 21), the latter floundered not because of industrial constraints but poor leadership and management. Kingfisher failed to take note of danger signals. Even the parent company, United Breweries, is facing tough competition from Pernod Ricard to stay ahead. Above all, the flamboyant lifestyle of Vijay Mallya does not inspire any signs of critical thinking to overcome the crisis.

Letters: Flighty Kingfisher

&ldquo;The Budget should focus on increased outlays for the sector and introduce measures to remove the bottlenecks that tend to impede the India growth story. Infra funding is a key issue.The government should try to create a PPP financing mechanism. Incentives like tax breaks to dedicated infra funds and long-terms debt markets will help give fresh impetus to the sector.

Industry speak: AM Naik

&ldquo;Besides allocating funds to infrastructure, we wish the Budget to strengthen the institutional capabilities in designing PPPs (railways, urban), in creating a predictable pipeline of projects (ports, airports), and in their effective implementation (roads). We also wish to see steps towards creating a credit-enhancement mechanism to channelise longer-term low-cost funds into infrastructure.

Expert speak: Manish B Agarwal

North Block is in pre-Budget mode but the usual annual restrictions on entry have become stricter than ever. It&rsquo;s not just journalists and outsiders but also finance ministry officials who are doubly wary of Intelligence Bureau (IB) sleuths. Their phone lines are tapped and movements watched, all in the interest of ensuring that no Budget proposal is leaked. This year, some officers were shaken when they received messages and phone calls from the IB wanting to verify some &ldquo;undisclosed&rdquo; information about their families and relatives. The result is that many of them are worried about even going out for tea breaks with colleagues in other departments and risking the IB&rsquo;s attentions.

To IB or not to IB

Apropos your report &ldquo;Ministry may dilute defence offset policy today&rdquo; (February 23), permitting technology transfer as an offset, with or without the &ldquo;multipliers&rdquo;, is the most laudable objective to attain self-sufficiency in the development of weapons systems urgently needed for the modernisation of our armed forces. But pricing the high technology is still an uncertain science and caution is needed in not only putting a figure on its price or the attending multiplier. Putting the price on a case-to-case basis will open the way for future scams. Therefore, the Defence Research and Development Organisation should list in advance all the technological gaps needed to complete its current or future projects early &mdash; with necessary multipliers assigned to each technology.

Business Standard

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