Budgeting and the arrogance of bureaucracy after 2,063 years?

 

“The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.”

— Cicero, 55 BC

Helpless India looks on…… and waits for the Home minister’s usual spiel!

Its more of anger and frustration that pushes me to write this post. I am sure that a major part of the country is today looking on with helplessness as we see the terrorist attacks in Mumbai unfold and the death toll goes to 87 with another 185 plus injured.

We will again have our Home Minister come out and give us his usual spiel on how he will let us know as soon as he finds out more about the attacks (as he was sleeping throughout the night and could not be briefed on the same). We will also have the usual noises from the rest of the polity. However, as this time the attacks are on the elite hotels and foreigners staying therein, maybe, there will be greater pressure on the government to come out of its slumber and act!

Tourism advisories are sure to come out from most countries abroad which will effect the tourism industry. In any case what locus standi does India have to call off the cricket tour to Pakistan when its own Financial Capital is under attack!

Crystal ball gazing, where are we headed from here?

"Your next-door neighbour can likely predict what is going to happen as accurately as we can." - Steve Jobs

This accurately sums up the debate today. In India everybody has an opinion about everything but the fact is that nobody knows where we are headed and what’s in store over the next couple of years. Today, on TV, there is a story of a couple killing themselves due to a set back suffered in the market. One day the market jumps 600 points and promptly the next day there is selling pressure bringing it back to the same or lower levels. The pundits who, at the beginning of the year, were talking of the sensex hitting 25,000 (some had even started talking of 50,000) are now asking ordinary investors to ‘have faith’ and keep invested for the ‘long run’. Try explaining this to a guy who had put in his life’s savings in the stock market and his corpus is now down 70%. What a mess, and we still have no clue as to where the bottom is, as we really don’t know how many more skeletons are yet to pop up across the world. Who all are guilty for this is another story, but as Jack and Suzy Welch said, quoting Agatha Christie, in Murder on the Orient Express, I guess, everybody is guilty in one way or another.

The only saving grace of being in India is that we are nowhere near a ‘recession’ and should grow between 6-7% even this year despite the global crisis. All of us who are getting regular calls from NRIs in the west should brace up for handling a greater influx of returning Indians this year, the only catch being – are these returning Indians capable of delivering under the Indian conditions? If not, just like a number of others, they will soon be going back to the west as soon as things improve a bit.

PS. Wipro has just announced its numbers and has cautioned about the future but TCS is still gung ho!

Six on 10, surely you`re joking?

I have been discussing this with my colleagues for the past number of days and I was glad to see this article by Sunil Jain in the Business Standard -

Set your sights low enough, and any progress made looks meaningful. And so it is with the score of six out of 10 that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has given the UPA government on its completion of a year in office. Use any other criterion, certainly by the standards set by Singh himself, and the performance is well below even a passing grade.

At this point, apologists and the spin-masters hired by the UPA will come out and tout the major achievements in the aviation sector and the opening up of banking, but it would be foolish to get caught up in the detail, especially since the NDA can rightfully claim that it had set the ball rolling on each of these initiatives........

Clearly a 60 per cent score today doesn’t mean what it used to in the old days.

State of Indian Politics

For once, in my opinion, Vinod Mehta of Outlook has had a change of heart and decided to call a spade a spade when it comes to the Congress and its strongest ally Sarvshri Lalu Prasad Yadav. It was nice of him to acknowledge that he has been a great supporter of LPY when he says this about Lalu

“When he made his simple-minded wife the chief minister, we said, "Poor man, who else can he trust?" Meanwhile, Bihar fell off the map of India and its galloping anarchy did not merit discussion because, in a sense, Bihar was not part of India. Bihar was Bihar. I don't absolve myself or Outlook from spreading the aforementioned logic. In the last 15 years, consequently, we have allowed Laloo a very easy ride.”

Now that Lalu is a Central Minister and responsible for the budget of a mammoth organization such as the Railways who is going to ensure that the kind of incidents that took place during his regime in Bihar are not replicated in the Centre - specially the Railways ? In case our leaders keep on citing “compulsions of coalition politics” and continue in the same vain – GOD Bless Us !

Formation of an NGO

An NGO can either be a registered or an unregistered
body and, in case it is to be a registered body, then it
can be formed in any of the following three ways:

1)As a Trust
2)As a Society
3)As a Company u/s 25 of the Companies Act, 1956

In case the NGO is looking for external funding then it
would be a good idea to register it as it would give some
comfort to the donors - be they National or International.
Even for Income Tax purposes it would be good idea to
create an instrument and register the same. Similarly
for FC (R) Act. It should be noted that all NGOs
with an Income in excess of Rs 50,000 are required to
get their accounts audited as per the conditions stipulated
by the Tax Department while granting exemption.

As regards collections, once one has an entity one
can open an Bank account and take donations by
cheque. In case one intends not to register then one can
be treated as an Association of Persons (AOP) by the
Bank and it can open a Bank account in the AOP’s
name.