This has not been the kindest of times for the ministry of shipping and the port sector. Ambitious plans to expand capacity by attracting large amounts of private investment in major ports have met with limited success. All available figures show that the ministry has been able to attract barely a small percentage of what it thought it could get by way of private investment.

Michael Pinto: Nobbling port projects

Business Standard

Saral, Sahaj and Sugam: for many readers these would have a familiar ring particularly in the month of July. No, they are not monsoon releases from the Karan Johar or Ekta Kapoor production house but names of forms used for filing income tax returns (ITRs). Given the tryst in July to file ITRs, I was at the office of my chartered accountant (CA) when I heard him chanting these names looking rather forlorn. Cheer up, I said to him, your life is much simpler these days.

Dilip James: Neither 'Saral' nor 'Sahaj'

OK , I&rsquo;ve been doing some domestic travelling and here&rsquo;s the thing about us: we still stand too close to each other, stare too much, ask too many questions, speak too loudly, are too eager to please and don&rsquo;t even get me started on our issues with queues.

We've come a long way

This time at Dastkar&rsquo;s annual Nature Bazaar, on till October 19 at Delhi&rsquo;s Crafts Museum, I was struck by the contemporary phad paintings on display there. Traditional phads from Rajasthan are large paintings on cloth portraying the epic lives of village gods, usually protectors of cattle. They&rsquo;ve always reminded me of comic strips since they are divided into several flat planes, each forming part of a long narrative. When I was growing up in Rajasthan many years ago, phads used to be an essential part of the repertory of bhopas, itinerant village storytellers. Who&rsquo;d have thought that a day would come when these pictorial stories of village heroes would find their ways into the living rooms of urban folks.

Geetanjali Krishna: Return of the phad

I want the driver,&rdquo; my wife says, &ldquo;to take me to get my hair done.&rdquo; &ldquo;I need him to drive me to my office,&rdquo; my daughter cribs, &ldquo;why do you want to pretty yourself anyway?&rdquo; &ldquo;Because I have a meeting,&rdquo; my wife says, &ldquo;why can&rsquo;t you go with your brother?&rdquo; &ldquo;Hey,&rdquo; I protest, &ldquo;I need the car, I have an interview in the morning.&rdquo; &ldquo;Dad,&rdquo; says my son, &ldquo;I put fuel in the car yesterday, you can&rsquo;t take my car.&rdquo; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s not your car,&rdquo; I tell him, &ldquo;nor your driver,&rdquo; I point out to the ladies, &ldquo;you all need to check with me before making off with my resources.

Kishore Singh: Family man woes

The poverty debate that flared up three weeks ago is dying down. Looking back, it is clear that this was another case of Left-leaning commentators venting their spleen without reason. Because, at the widely-mocked expenditure level of Rs 32 per day in the cities and Rs 26 in the villages, the official Indian poverty line is comparable to that used by the United Nations (UN) for its Millennium Development Goals (MDG). The MDG poverty line is $1.25 per day.

T N Ninan: Righteous rage indeed

News that two paintings by Nicholas Roerich stolen from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute were auctioned recently in London became widely reported. The IARI said it would investigate the missing paintings, trustees cried out for an audit of Roerich&rsquo;s works, there has been the suggestion that CBI and Interpol will look into the matter.

The great art robbery

It is not good to hold a state and a people to ransom. This is precisely what the central government is doing in the case of Andhra Pradesh. The state, especially the region asking for separation, Telangana, has been on the boil since late 2009. The government set up the Srikrishna committee to &ldquo;fact find&rdquo; and suggest a set of solutions with their pros and cons to help resolve the issue.

Bathkamma: The Telangana imbroglio

Of the many computing devices Steve Jobs and his team produced that were revolutionary in technology and sleek in design, the one that changed my life was the advent of the mouse. Its effect was both exhilarating and liberating. As someone brought up on the use of the typewriter (how distant the world of Remingtons, Smith-Coronas and Olivetti portables seems now!) who progressed from bulky desktops to short text portables, this simple inexpensive attachment speeded up and reshaped the art of writing. It reordered the way we work. Gone were the messy days of correction fluids, of deletions and changes marked in ballpoint. By reducing the use of the space bar, it gave the cursor fresh impetus and energy. Smooth to the touch, easily navigable, the mouse freed the rearrangement of words, sentences and thoughts. Its interface with the screen clicked as an extension of the brain.

Sunil Sethi: Why Steve Jobs is my hero

Who was Sun Yat-sen? Few people in India know about his life and deeds. Born in November 1866, Dr Sun is considered the founder of modern China.

K Natwar Singh: A march into China's past

General Assembly has taken on a scruffy new meaning. It&rsquo;s no longer about the widely held assemblage at the United Nations, of sharp-suited bureaucrats and top politicians. It&rsquo;s been replaced with something far more pedestrian, less organised and yet more impressive at New York&rsquo;s Zuccotti Park. Even so, the gathering of the so called &ldquo;99 per cent&rdquo;, who have lost out to the great American dream because of the economic collapse caused by Wall Street's excesses, have been widely criticised for not having a unified agenda. Nothing could be further from the truth of the leaderless, autonomous, hierarchy-free &ldquo;Occupy Wall Street&rdquo; assembly &mdash; its unifying theme is to protest rampant unfairness and greed.

The writing on the Wall

The matter of the applicability of direct and indirect taxes to supplies of goods and services from India to offshore installations, typically situated in the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) i.e. within 200 nautical miles of the appropriate baseline, as per the Territorial Waters, Continental Shelf, Exclusive Economic Zone and other Maritime Zones Act 1976 (MZA for short), has been the subject of much litigation.

Applicability of sales tax to offshore supplies

The concept of Force of Attraction (FoA) has been adopted in some of the tax treaties which India has signed with other countries. This concept is applied in order to determine the tax base of a foreign enterprise in the other State. In order to determine the tax base in other State, it is necessary to determine the existence of a Permanent Establishment (PE) in the other State. The concept of FoA is also used in determining the existence of PE in the other State.

Significance of force of attraction clause in tax treaties 

Recently, the auditor&acirc;&euro;&trade;s comments on the financial statement of an aviation company drew a lot of media attention. Two issues were highlighted. First, regarding an accounting policy that apparently is not consistent with the extant Indian accounting standards (AS). The second related to the auditor&acirc;&euro;&trade;s comments on the &lsquo;going concern&rsquo; status of the company. The media rushed to the judgement that the deviation from AS was an attempt at earnings management, and that the auditor&rsquo;s comment on &lsquo;going concern&rsquo; cast doubts on the long-term survival of the company. As it turns out, this media frenzy ignored some of the realities of the accounting environment in India.

The accountant's dilemma

With barely six weeks to go for the next international summit on climate change, in Durban, India is making every effort to dispel the impression, created by the flexibilities it displayed at the last two summits, that it had ditched the developing countries on key aspects of the negotiations on how to deal with climate change. New Delhi has used every available international forum in recent months to go back to its original posture on the subject, insisting on greater binding commitments from the developed countries before beginning to discuss the developed countries&rsquo; demand for mandatory action by all nations on limiting global warming.

Back to basics

The Supreme Court last week set aside the judgment of the Bombay high court and the Mumbai labour court and rejected the allegation of the trade union of Siemens Ltd that the promotion scheme of the company was &ldquo;unfair labour practice&rdquo; under industrial laws.

Supreme Court asks labour courts to note &#39;emerging economic order&#39;

L K Advani&rsquo;s sixth yatra seems to have been undertaken under an evil star. While its ostensible purpose was to cleanse public life of corruption, it was generally seen as a gambit for projecting himself on the national stage and thereby remaining in some future race for prime ministership. The yatra proved accident-prone, as the bus got stuck under a bridge, and then malfunctioned; senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders fell ill &mdash; probably after ingesting carbon monoxide. Matters got worse when party workers in Madhya Pradesh were caught handing out cash to local reporters in return for favourable coverage of the yatra &mdash; thereby also establishing that newspaper proprietors are not the only people in the media who indulge in the practice of &ldquo;paid news&rdquo;, journalists do the same.

Ill-starred yatra

In the spring of 2006 this newspaper published a report quoting a letter written by Congress party President Sonia Gandhi to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in which she had expressed concern about the impact of a free trade agreement (FTA) that India was at the time negotiating with the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) on India&rsquo;s plantation economy.

Sanjaya Baru: India and Vietnam

On March 23, 2010, Manmohan Singh, at an Infra Conference in Vigyan Bhawan, New Delhi, said, &ldquo;Preliminary exercises suggest that investment in infrastructure will have to expand to $1,000 billion in the Twelfth Plan period. I urge the finance ministry and the Planning Commission to draw up a plan of action for achieving this level of investment.

Vinayak Chatterjee: What the 12th Plan wants

The worst of the coal crisis may be over, and the country may be able to avoid the power crisis that had seemed imminent as coal stocks with power stations ran down to critically low levels. This is because Coal India, which supplies the bulk of the coal that feeds power stations, has managed to ramp up supplies from 0.6 million tonnes a day to nearly a million tonnes; the usual level is 0.9 million tonnes. The Railways has helped by providing more wagons than usual. Coal supplies had been hit over several weeks because of the flooding of coal mines following heavy rains in parts of the country, the disruptions caused by the Telangana agitation, and a one-day strike by workers last week, supporting their demand for a higher bonus. Coal stocks at some power stations had dropped to a couple of days&rsquo; supply, bringing back memories of the periodic supply crises that used to erupt in the seventies and eighties.

Strikes and shortages

Last weekend&rsquo;s meeting of the finance ministers of the G20 countries has not produced any breakthroughs in terms of the immediate crisis facing the group, namely eurozone; the matter has, therefore, been left to be resolved by the eurozone countries, who are meeting separately this coming weekend. The proposal to give greater financial firepower to the International Monetary Fund came a cropper, as countries ranging from the United States to Australia were all opposed; judging by the admittedly scanty reports. India seems to have sat on the fence but may have been willing to go along, unlike some other Brics countries. India&rsquo;s focus at the meeting seems to have been on greater information sharing with regard to bank transactions and related tax issues in offshore financial centres.

G20 leaves it to eurozone

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