Traps to avoid during tax planning

Vidya Mohan

How often have people planned a financial transaction meticulously, down to optimisation of tax implications, based on advice, hearsay, or their own reading of the law, and then realised to their dismay that a minor detail or development has been overlooked and the entire dynamics have changed significantly?

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Grasping the oil price, inflation linkage

Nupur Pavan Bang and Arindam Mahato

“Are the economic principles of demand and supply still valid?” asked a friend. We are at a loss for words for we are staunch supporter of economics. He continues, “I am scared to buy a car, for fear of oil prices touching the roof. Obviously the demand-supply position of oil has not changed drastically in the past one year, but the oil prices have more than doubled in one year and about quadrupled in the past five years.

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Water harvesting

M. J. Prabu

Year 1999: The villagers of Kothapally in Andhra Pradesh were becoming worried. The monsoon as usual has played truant. With fast depleting water tables and acute water shortage, many of the farmers were losing sleep.
“I have decided to lease out my lands and go to Hyderabad to seek some job. My brother-in-law has promised to help me,” says Srinivasa Reddy a farmer who has four acres and a family of four to feed.

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Currency futures are here

Nupur Pavan Bang and Zohra Zabeen

Ravini is in a gloomy mood. As usual, she feels let down by the management education system of which she is a part — as a student, that is. She has absolutely no clue about the recently launched currency futures on the NSE (National Stock Exchange). In the last few days, she was haunted by currency derivatives even in her sleep.

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Mushroom money

M. J. Prabu

Fifty-two-year-old Lal Muni Devi has been leading a life of drudgery and
poverty. Her husband is sick and unable to work, so Lal Muni and her younger son have to work as day labourersin other fields. What little she earned till now, she saved to marry off one of her daughters. But Lal Muni is not alone. There are several like her in her village, Azad Nagar, living in dark windowless, single-room thatched sheds, which also double up as cowsheds for some. Life is indeed very tough for them.

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Reap more from organic farming

M. J. Prabu
Velucamy Naicker of Rasapalayam village in Tamil Nadu is a worried man these days. Hailing from a family of farmers, Veluchamy has about 15 acres as inherited property. Right from his schooldays he had been helping his father in the field, and even after his marriage and having four children (three daughters and a son) the income from his land was sufficient to marry off his daughters and send his son for engineering in the city.

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Dollar’s descent vs rupee’s ascent

V. R. Vinod Kumar

Venkat, an investment banker, and Nikhil Akali, a senior executive in a captive BPO, both college mates, meet for dinner at one of their favourite restaurants. Nikhil doesn’t seem to be in his usual cheerful mood. Venkat enquires, “You appear bit dull today, what’s the matter?”
Nikhil speaks in a hazy voice, “It’s about the dollar-rupee thing again, with one going down and the other going up. Everybody in my industry is worried and all kinds of horror stories such as salary cuts and slow growth are floating around…I am not sure what’s happening.”
“I think this is something we must learn to live with. Today countries are so closely united and one man’s meat is becoming another man’s poison,” Venkat says philosophically.

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