For a somewhat dysfunctional family, we get by, sometimes only in part, true, but mostly all right nevertheless. In the summers, this usually means three things &mdash; taking a long trip to be with my parents in Bikaner for the shortest time possible (since there&rsquo;s nothing more unpleasant than June in the desert); arguing (and fighting and sulking) for weeks on end till we somehow agree on a destination (mostly out of exhaustion) for our annual holiday; and celebrating my wife&rsquo;s birthday (after the appropriate and hypocritical &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s not do anything this year, guys!&rdquo;). The calendar has a place for all these things, and, in due course, after the usual brooding and moping, everyone is somewhat happy or, at least, not unhappy.

Kishore Singh: Breaks that break you

Business Standard

Very few investors give a serious thought to the underlying issues involved in an investing style and if it fits their personal risk-profile.

Deconstructing the 'tips' game

Haxan, &ldquo;a creaky old movie&rdquo; made in 1922, remains relevant to our times.

A rational Devil

In 2007, Fifa President Sepp Blatter visited Kolkata and watched a match between traditional rivals East Bengal and Mohun Bagan. Afterwards, asked whether Fifa would invest more money in Indian football, the voluble Swiss said: &ldquo;Help yourself and heaven will help you&rdquo;. Which was an elliptical way of saying no. Few people would argue with Mr Blatter on this point, even if they haven't witnessed the painfully low quality of India&rsquo;s top football clubs. With a country ranking of 133, India has few reasons to put before Fifa for funds. But Mr Blatter was making a more important point that Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel, who heads India's football federation, may want to consider as the 2010 Fifa World Cup draws to a close after being hosted by a country with an economy a quarter the size of India&rsquo;s.

India's own goal

Media reports suggest that the Bharat Bandh ordered by most opposition political parties, cutting across ideological divides, cost the country several thousand crores of rupees in lost incomes and output, and contributed to lost daily wages for millions of poor. This was the direct cost. Also, disruption of public transport and vandalisation of public property heaped suffering on millions. A person in need of medical treatment may have arrived late at a hospital, children missed school, and so on.

K Subrahmanyam: Bandhs - acts of terror by another name

There was a time not long ago when you could end up feeling rather poor at a dinner in Dubai. Guests would discuss the millions of dollars they had spent buying their dream home no. 2, 5 or 21, depending on who you spoke to. I know people who ended up buying a place because they felt utterly left out at dinners where rich expatriates sipped expensive wine and tucked into mouth-watering kebabs.

Rahul Sharma: It's not about greed, but sustainability

Our founding fathers adopted specific electoral systems for specific institutions of the state. While elections to the Lower Houses of the Central and state legislatures were on the basis of adult suffrage and first-past-the-post in delimited constituencies, elections to the Upper Houses was on the basis of proportional representation through a single transferable vote. A similar electoral system of proportional representation through a single transferable vote with different electorates has also been prescribed for the elections of the President and the Vice-President.

'The idea of representation is thinning'

Why do half the girls who join school drop out by the time they are in Class VI? The reasons are many. For instance, a woman migrant worker from Murshidabad who migrated to Delhi said she stopped going to school because her teachers were harsh and she was too terrified.

Sreelatha Menon: Second chance for dropouts

The Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC) has simplified the procedure for claiming refund of the 4 per cent additional duty of customs (4 per cent countervailing duty, or CVD) paid on imported goods for importers having recognition under Accredited Clients Programme of the Customs (ACP clients).

CBEC has made tax refund on imported goods easier

Indian GAAP requires that revenue should be measured by the charges made to the customer. IAS 18 requires that revenue should be measured at the fair value of the consideration received or receivable from the customer. It stipulates that if the payment is deferred and the time value is material, fair value of the consideration is the present value (PV) of the consideration determined using the imputed interest rate as the discount rate.

Revenue be measured on what customer pays

A year ago, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecast that the world economy would grow 2.5 per cent during 2010. Last October, it raised that number to 3.1 per cent. By January this year, the Fund had become positively optimistic, raising its global growth forecast to 3.9 per cent. That was raised further to 4.2 per cent in April, and has now been pegged at 4.6 per cent &mdash; which would make it a boom year. That&rsquo;s a good distance to cover for any forecaster.

The IMF gets more upbeat

Under the existing Indian law, the Tax Treaties (DTAA) that India has signed with other countries supersede the domestic tax law of both the respective countries. The Supreme Court in case of &ldquo;Azadi Bachao Andolan&rdquo; [263 ITR 706] also clarified that a Tax Treaty is essentially a bargain between two sovereign States.

Amendments relating to tax treaties need a relook

The previous article in this column had discussed the basic features of the proposed dual Goods and Services Tax (&lsquo;GST&rsquo;) and the typical treatment of the Telecommunication Sector thereunder, given the significant role of the sector in the economy as well as the broad challenges that the sector has faced under the present indirect tax regime.

GST of telecom should keep it affordable

Twenty-five years after launching the Ganga Action Plan (GAP), the government has realised that a new plan backed by proper technical advice is needed to clean this mighty river, which is fast turning into a drain. A consortium of seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) has been roped in to suggest strategies and actions to rejuvenate the Ganga basin and restore the quality of river water. This, in a way, is tantamount to confessing that over a thousand crore of rupees have been frittered away in the past quarter-century on cleaning the Ganga without making any headway. The Ganga is more polluted now than in 1985, when the then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, launched the Ganga Action Plan. The Ganga basin is the largest in the country and the fourth-biggest in the world. It is a source of livelihood for the 400 million people who live along its 2,500-km length from Gangotri in the Himalayas to Ganga Sagar, where it merges into the Bay of Bengal.

Once more, with technologists

A case of clandestine transport of war material and explosives from abroad to Kandla port in the garb of &ldquo;heavy metal scrap&rdquo; has become a bone of contention between the port trust and a shipping agent, Goodrich Maritime (P) Ltd. The goods were confiscated by the customs department. The company sought the release of its containers after de-stuffing the goods.

Transport of war material

Six years of a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government, and the prospect of another five, drove the Left Front, the bloc of mainstream Indian communist parties, into the arms of a self-declared &ldquo;Left-of-Centre&rdquo; Sonia Gandhi in 2004. Six years of a Congress party-led government and the prospect of defeat in its pocket borough of West Bengal are now driving the Left closer to the BJP.

Sanjaya Baru: Sushma & Brinda, Mamata & Sonia

By the time this article is published, the European winner of the Football World Cup 2010 would be known. In the framing of macroeconomic policies, however, Europe seems to have lost to the financial markets. It is obvious that the fiscal contraction now happening in most major European economies, involving both tax increase and expenditure cuts, is a surrender to rating companies and bond investors. Policy-makers are still traumatised by what happened in Greece, and are willing to make their people suffer to placate financial markets. It is amazing that this stance is being adopted even when unemployment in the EU as a whole is 10 per cent; when core inflation and bond yields (Greece and a few others apart) are as low as one would wish them to be.

A V Rajwade: Financial markets-1, Europe-0

It is an opportune time for the mutual fund industry and the regulator to sit together and work out changes in an atmosphere of trust.

Pratip Kar: Mutual suspicion to mutual trust

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), entrusted with the task of providing identification numbers to all residents, had a brush with controversy last week. Newspaper reports said that the expenditure finance committee of the finance ministry had slashed its budget by more than half, to Rs 3,000 crore. The implication of the reported cut was that the Authority would be able to issue only 100 million unique identification numbers, compared to 600 million numbers originally planned for the first phase.

Incentive for a number

A bad workman, it is said, finds fault with the tools. This seems to be true of the environment and forest ministry when it comes to wildlife conservation. Unable to check the rise in wildlife crime and the illicit trade in wildlife products, the ministry has put the blame on the Wildlife Conservation Act, 1972, which, it feels, is not stringent enough to deter criminals. It has, therefore, come out with a draft Bill to amend this statute, and hike steeply the penalties for wildlife-related misdeeds, the idea being to raise the economic cost of committing wildlife crimes. This is fine, but the cost of a crime becomes an effective deterrent only if the perpetrators are caught and convicted. This is not usually the case; wildlife activists reckon that the conviction rate is as low as 1 per cent. Even when notorious wildlife traders, such as Sansar Chand, are nabbed and convicted, the follow-up action to destroy their networks is usually found wanting.

Not the law

Yesterday&rsquo;s editorial in this newspaper (&ldquo;The IMF gets more upbeat&rdquo;, July 12, 2010) noted that the IMF has had a patchy record in charting the evolution of the present crisis, following developments more than anticipating them. Despite this performance, and its poor performance in predicting the crisis, each update of its forecast for the global economy (the &ldquo;World Economic Outlook&rdquo;, or WEO) receives considerable international press attention and commentary.

Suman Bery: Are happy days here again?

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