7 key areas that the Budget must address to re-energise the infrastructure sector, suggests Vinayak Chatterjee.
The Department of Telecommunications (DOT) on Wednesday received over Rs 17,873 crore from companies towards 5G spectrum dues. Nearly half the amount (Rs 8312.4 crore) was paid by Bharti Airtel, which made advance payments for four years to free up cash for future investments. Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea paid Rs 7,864 crore and Rs 1,680 crore, respectively.
Taking a serious note of the state government's alleged failure to provide land for burial grounds, the Karnataka high court caustically asked if bodies have to be dumped on roads.
The government on Thursday imposed a 20 per cent export duty on non-Basmati rice except for parboiled rice to boost domestic supplies amid a fall in area under the paddy crop in the current Kharif season. According to a notification by the revenue department, an export duty of 20 per cent has been imposed on 'rice in husk (paddy or rough)' and 'husked (brown) rice'. The Central Board of Indirect Taxes & Customs further said the export of 'semi-milled or wholly-milled rice, whether or not polished or glazed(other than Parboiled rice and Basmati rice)' will also attract a customs duty of 20 per cent.
Country's largest telecom player Jio has completed 5G coverage planning in top 1,000 cities and conducted field trials of its home-grown 5G telecom gears, Reliance Industries said in its annual report. In the report, RIL (Reliance Industries Limited) said that Jio took major steps during 2021-22 in getting ready for 5G with its 100 per cent indigenous technology. The company was the biggest bidder in the recently-concluded 5G spectrum auction.
Punjab Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi on Tuesday allocated portfolios to the new ministers, keeping 14 departments with himself and giving home affairs to deputy chief minister Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa and health to other deputy O P Soni.
The finance ministry will kick-start the exercise to prepare the Union Budget for financial year 2022-23 (FY23) from October 12, according to an official notification released on Monday. "The pre-Budget meetings as well as the meetings to discuss the revised estimates will start from October 12 and will continue till the second week of November," according to the Budget circular of the Department of Economic Affairs' Budget Division. The Union Budget is expected to be announced on February 1, as has been the practice of the past few years.
When the matter came up today, Justice Ramaswamy strongly condemned the action of the lawyers and remarked it was a very cheap practice, scandalising the judiciary.
The Biden administration has proposed a massive hike in immigration fees, including the much sought-after H-1B visas for high-skilled foreign workers, which is very popular among Indian tech professionals. Under the proposed rule, published by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on Wednesday, the application for the H-1B visa increases from $460 to $780, and L-1 from $460 to $1,385. The application fee for O-1 visas has been proposed to increase from $460 to $1,055.
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin's Cabinet, including him, would be 34-member strong and he has retained senior leaders like Duraimurugan and over a dozen shall be ministers for the first time.
Only 80.6 per cent of the Rs 6-trillion allocation has been spent by February, data from the Controller General of Accounts shows.
Telecom operator Bharti Airtel on Friday said it has paid Rs 15,519 crore to the government towards prepayment of its entire deferred liability pertaining to spectrum acquired in the 2014 auction. The company had acquired 128.4 MHz spectrum (including Telenor spectrum) for a consideration of Rs 19,051 crore in the 2014 auction, Airtel said in a statement. The company estimates that the prepayment to Department of Telecom (DoT) will likely result in interest cost savings of at least Rs 3,400 crore over the residual life for fully substituted capital.
Former Mumbai zonal director of the Narcotics Control Bureau Sameer Wankhede on Thursday filed an affidavit in a court in Maharashtra's Washim district, stating their family belongs to a Scheduled Caste community and has not embraced any other religion.
After publication and broadcast of the news, the district administration constituted a committee of revenue and health officials for an inquiry into the news report, the FIR said.
The clean chit to Aryan Khan and five others by the Narcotics Control Bureau on Friday has once again brought the central agency's former zonal director Sameer Wankhede under the spotlight.
With COVID-19 cases and the positivity rate rising in Delhi, the district officials have started forming teams to strictly enforce the mask mandate and issue a fine of Rs 500 to violators, officials said.
'The message is not clear whether we are wanted.' 'All this could adversely impact our strategy in India and also investments.'
He was permanently absorbed into the ED cadre in 2014 and has headed some high-profile investigations into the 2G spectrum allocation case, the 2010 Commonwealth Games, the money laundering cases against former Union finance minister P Chidambaram and his son Karti Chidambaram, Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy and former Jharkhand chief minister Madhu Koda, the Aircel Maxis and VVIP choppers case.
In his second term in office, UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has retained 34 portfolios.
The conversion of interest into equity stake for the government in Vodafone Idea (Vi) will be decided after the telecommunications (telecom) company's stock price stabilises above Rs 10, India's largest mobile tower installation company Indus Towers has said in its second-quarter report. The board of Vi had, in January, approved the conversion of Rs 16,130 crore worth of interest on adjusted gross revenue dues into equity for the government. This will give the government around 33 per cent stake in Vi.
The tragic incident occurred on Wednesday when the Appar temple's chariot procession was passing through the Thanjavur-Boodalur Road.
The government on Wednesday extended the tenure of Enforcement Directorate Director Sanjay Kumar Mishra by a year till November 18, 2022, days after the Centre brought ordinances to allow ED and Central Bureau of Investigation directors to occupy the office for up to five years.
'There are unscrupulous traders who create fake invoices by showing bogus e-way bills, movement of goods.' 'Since the entities registered across different states, and kept on changing their numbers, tracing them was difficult.'
"The Pujari is only a grantee to manage the property of the deity and such grant can be reassumed if the Pujari fails to do the task assigned to him, i.e, to offer prayers and manage the land. He cannot be thus treated as a Bhumiswami," the bench said.
The 15 ministers were sworn in on Sunday for the expanded Gehlot cabinet, fulfilling a key demand of former deputy chief minister Sachin Pilot whose rebellion last year shook the state's Congress government.
Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai on Monday said that he will ask his Maharashtra counterpart Eknath Shinde not to send his ministers to Belagavi, amid the raging border dispute between both the state, as it may disrupt the law and order situation in the border district.
Production, storage and sale of firecrackers in the capital will be punishable with a fine of up to Rs 5,000 and three years jail under Section 9B of the Explosives Act, the minister told a press conference in New Delhi.
J Radhakrishnan, who was among top state officials who had a tab on the treatment of Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa in 2016 at the Apollo Hospitals till her demise in December that year, has replaced her.
SC said 10 per cent of the amount would have to be paid by March 31.
The Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) also issued guidelines for implementation of the ban on firecrackers, which included directions to the Delhi Police to register a first information report against the violators of the ban.
The central government has for the first time allowed a private company, Bajaj Healthcare, to process opium to extract alkaloids used to make pain-killers, cough syrups, and even cancer drugs. Two government factories in Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh, and Neemuch, Madhya Pradesh, do the work yet, processing some 800 tonnes of opium gum annually to extract alkaloids. The government on Tuesday gave Thane-based Bajaj Healthcare an initial contract to process 500 tonnes of opium gum annually and wants production to be at 800 tonnes per annum (tpa) in the next five years, indicating the state's exit from the highly-regulated sector.
A delegation of Meghalaya ministers led by CM Conrad K Sangma will meet Union Home Minister Amit Shah on November 24 to demand a CBI or NIA probe into the violence that left six people dead on the state's border with Assam.
The Centre has recovered around Rs 95.86 crore from at least 11 crypto exchanges for evading goods and services tax (GST), according to data released by Parliament on Monday. The amount includes interest and penalty. The GST investigation department has detected a total tax evasion of Rs 81.54 crore by crypto exchanges that include WazirX, Coin DCX, CoinSwitch Kuber, Buy Ucoin, UnoCoin and Flitpay, among other exchanges. In a written reply to Lok Sabha, minister of state (MoS) for finance Pankaj Chaudhary said 11 cases of GST evasion by cryptocurrency exchanges have been detected by central GST formations.
Nine people, including five students, were killed after a private tourist bus hit a state-run KSRTC bus from behind at Vadakkenchery in Palakkad district, Kerala Road Transport Minister Antony Raju said on Thursday.
The I-T department had issued re-assessment notice in March 2015 to the media group after noting that Rs 642 crore has allegedly not been computed for the tax assessment purposes of NDTV for financial year 2007-2008.
Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea have communicated to the telecom department that they will not pay AGR dues of Rs 88,624 crore, the deadline for which ended on Thursday, and will wait for the outcome of modification petition listed for hearing before the Supreme Court next week, according to official sources. Reliance Jio on Thursday paid Rs 195 crore to the telecom department to clear all adjusted gross revenue dues accounted till January 31, 2020, according to an official source.
The preliminary processing of tax returns is already undertaken with the help of technology. There is now greater scope of using more technology to reduce the human interface even further, notes A K Bhattacharya.
A railway official said a train has been booked for the Dussehra rally from Nanded city in central Maharashtra.
If Kerala wants to sustain its room for independent thinking and talk back to Delhi when needed, it should put its finances in order. Or - if one takes the North East example - Kerala's political posturing may end up commensurate with its financial dependence on others, suggests Shyam G Menon.
The Delhi government's budget size for 2022-23 was Rs 75,800 crore and Rs 69,000 crore in the preceding year.
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