The Income Declaration Scheme 2016 to open from 1st June 2016.

The Income Declaration Scheme 2016 to open from 1st June 2016.

The Income Declaration Scheme, 2016 incorporated as Chapter IX of the Finance Act 2016 provides an opportunity to all persons who have not declared income correctly in earlier years to come forward and declare such undisclosed income(s).

Under the Scheme, such income as declared by the eligible persons, would be taxed at the rate of 30% plus a ‘Krishi Kalyan Cess’ of 25% on the taxes payable and a penalty at the rate of 25% of the taxes payable, thereby totalling to 45% of the income declared under the scheme.

The scheme shall remain in force for a period of 4 months from 1st June, 2016 to 30th September, 2016 for filing of declarations and payments towards taxes, surcharge & penalty must be made latest by 30th November, 2016. Declarations can be filed online or with the jurisdictional Pr. Commissioners of Income-tax across the country.

· The scheme shall apply to undisclosed income whether in the form of investment in assets or otherwise, pertaining to Financial Year 2015-16 or earlier.

· Where the declaration is in the form of investment in assets, the Fair Market Value of such asset as on 1st June 2016 shall be deemed to be the undisclosed income under the Scheme. However, foreign assets or income to which the Black Money Act 2015 applies are not eligible for declaration under this scheme.

· Assets specified in the declaration shall be exempt from Wealth tax.

· No Scrutiny and enquiry under the Income-tax Act or the Wealth tax Act shall be undertaken in respect of such declarations.

· Immunity from prosecution under the Income-tax Act and Wealth Tax Act is also provided along with immunity from the Benami Transactions (Prohibition) Act, 1988 subject to transfer of asset to actual owner within the period specified in the Rules.

· Non-payment of total taxes, surcharge & penalty in time or declaration by misrepresentation or suppression of facts shall render the declaration void.

· The circumstances in which the Scheme shall not apply or where a person is held to be ineligible are specified in section 196 (Chapter IX) of the Finance Act, 2016.

· Non declaration of undisclosed income under the Scheme, will render such undisclosed income liable to tax in the previous year in which it is detected by the Income tax Department. Other penal consequences will also follow accordingly.

Wildlife Institute of India to relocate endangered ‘dancing deer’ of Manipur

Wildlife Institute of India to relocate endangered ‘dancing deer’ of Manipur

The scientists of Wildlife Institute of India (WII) have been assigned the task to provide second home to 110 Sangai , brow-antlered and one of the most endangered species under Centre’s Endangered Species Recovery Project.

Details:

The sangai is an endemic, rare and endangered subspecies of brow-antlered deer. It is also state animal of Manipur.

The Sangai is now restricted to the Keibul Lamjao National Park (KLNP) in the Southeastern fringe of Loktak Lake in Manipur. Phumdis, floating vegetation occupy about two-third of the surface area of the lake. They feed, live and breed on this 9 km area of Phumdis.
It is classified as “Endangered” by the IUCN.

Why it is called “dancing deer”?

While walking on the floating biomass, Sangai often balances itself which looks as if it is dancing on the green grassland and therefore popularly called as “dancing deer” of Manipur

UN Declares APJ Abdul Kalam’s Birthday As ‘World Students Day’

UN Declares APJ Abdul Kalam’s Birthday As ‘World Students Day’

World Students Day: It was year 2010 when United Nations decided to mark the importance of India’s former President and great scientist APJ Abdul Kalam and declared his birthday as ‘World Students Day’.

October 15, which is Dr. Kalam’s birth anniversary, is celebrated as a day for students all around the world. Even Dr. Kalam always expressed his wish to be remembered as a teacher by the people.

दक्षिण कोरिया की लेखिका ‪#‎HanKang‬ ने द वेजेटेरियन के लिए जीता वर्ष 2016 का अंतरराष्ट्रीय ‪#‎ManBookerPrize‬

दक्षिण कोरिया की लेखिका ‪#‎HanKang‬ ने द वेजेटेरियन के लिए जीता वर्ष 2016 का अंतरराष्ट्रीय ‪#‎ManBookerPrize‬

South Korean author, Han Kang, has won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for her novel 'The Vegetarian'.
It tells a story of a wife who decides to become a vegetarian. The decision provokes cruelty from her husband, and from her father, and obsession from her sister’s husband, as the woman, Yeong-hye, dreams obsessively about becoming a tree.
Han is the first South Korean to win the prize.
The Vegetarian" is the first of her books to be translated into English. It tells the story of Yeong-hye, a dutiful wife whose decision to forego meat uproots her whole existence.

South Korean author Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction on Monday with “The Vegetarian,” an unsettling novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.

Literary critic Boyd Tonkin, chair of the panel that chose the winner from 155 entries, said Han’s book combined “tenderness and terror” in a tale of “volcanic, visceral intensity.”

The award is the international counterpart to Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize and is open to books published in any language that have been translated into English.

The prize money will be split evenly between Ms. Han and her 28-year-old translator, Deborah Smith, who only began learning Korean less than seven years ago.

“The Vegetarian” is the first of her books to be translated into English. It tells the story of Yeong-hye, a dutiful wife whose decision to forego meat uproots her whole existence.

The author said she wanted to explore “human violence, and also (ask) a question about human dignity.”

The prize named after its sponsor, financial services firm Man Group PLC was previously a career honour, but changed this year to recognize a single work of fiction.

The change comes amid signs that English-speaking readers are slowly becoming more receptive to translated literature. Research firm Nielsen Book says the British market for translated fiction almost doubled between 2001 and 2015 but still accounts for just 1.5 percent of all fiction sales.

Man Booker is one of the few literary prizes to recognize translators alongside authors, and marks an extraordinary victory for Smith- “The Vegetarian” is not just the first Korean novel she had translated, but the first she had read.

“For a short novel, it felt like climbing a mountain,” she said.

The other contenders were Yan Lianke’s “The Four Books,” one of the few Chinese novels to tackle the Great Famine of the 1950s and ‘60s; Angolan revolution saga “A General Theory of Oblivion” by Jose Eduardo Agualusa; and the Alpine story “A Whole Life” by Austria’s Robert Seethaler.

ISRO’s Reusable Launch Vehicle to take off next week

ISRO’s Reusable Launch Vehicle to take off next week
The technology demonstrator will take place from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.

The first technology demonstrator (TD) launch of the Indian Space Research Organisation’s Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV), or the spaceplane in popular parlance, will take place on May 23 at 9.30 a.m. from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC), Sriharikota, according to ISRO officials.

Visually, the RLV-TD is a rocket-aircraft combination measuring about 17 m, whose first stage is a solid propellant booster rocket and the second stage is a 6.5 m long aircraft-like winged structure sitting atop the rocket.

A misnomer

However, the popular perception of the technology as a marriage between rocket and aircraft is a misnomer.

In RLV-TD that is awaiting launch at SHAR, the first stage, weighing about 9 tonnes, is merely the Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV-3) flown in the 1980s.

The vehicle will take off like a rocket and the RLV will be taken to a height of 70 km and where the booster will release the vehicle to carry out its manoeuvres.

Hypersonic Experiment 1

According to Dr. K. Sivan, director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvanathapuram, where the RLV was designed, assembled and where it underwent basic electrical, hydraulic and “sign check” tests, the objective is to achieve hypersonic speeds to basically test the hypersonic aero-thermodynamic characterisation of the winged body’s re-entry, its control and guidance systems, autonomous mission management to land at a specific location at sea and testing of “hot structures” that make up the structure of the RLV.

The test is, therefore, termed as Hypersonic Experiment 1 (HEX-1).

Complex technology

A conventional launch vehicle (LV), says Dr. Sivan, spends the lowest time of its flight in the atmosphere, whereas the RLV system spends all the time in the atmosphere. Also, while an aircraft experiences limited flight regime of say Mach 0 to Mach 2 or so, the RLV experiences a much wider range of flight regimes.

Hence the technology of an RLV is much more complex basically arising from the design of the control and guidance systems, he pointed out.

In HEX1, the winged RLV is otherwise a dummy with no powered flight of its own. In this test, the RLV will attain a flight regime of Mach 5 with the help of the booster alone, Dr. Sivan said. At the end of the HEX1 mission, the aircraft will land in sea. The total flight duration of the RLV-TD from launch till splash down will be about 10 mins.

However, the ultimate objective of the RLV programme of ISRO is to enable the vehicle traverse a very wide range of flight regimes from Mach 0 to Mach 25 based on air-breathing propulsion for achieving two-stage-to-orbit (TSTO) launch capability.

The integrated test system (booster plus the RLV-TD) is already at the SDSC (SDSC), Sriharikota. Prior to being moved to Sriharikota, the RLV subsystem underwent acoustic tests at the National Aerospace Laboratories of the CSIR (CSIR-NAL) and the booster went as a separate subsystem directly from VSSC. At SDSC the two were mated together.

Dr. A.S. Kiran Kumar, ISRO Chairman, called the first test launch HEX1 “a very preliminary step” and stressed that “we have to go a long way” before it could be called a re-usable launch system. “But these are very essential steps we have to take,” he said.

Lower cost

Asked whether the Indian reusable launch system was aimed at bringing down the launch cost, the ISRO Chairman said, “It will bring down the cost. Towards that, we will have to work and go through these initial steps,” the Chairman said.

Flying test bed

The present design is basically “a flying test bed to evaluate various technologies, namely hypersonic flight, autonomous landing, powered cruise flight and hypersonic flight using air-breathing propulsion using a scramjet engine”, according to ISRO website.

The HEX series of experiments will be followed by the landing experiment (LEX), return flight experiment and scramjet propulsion experiment (SPEX).

The basic design of a scramjet has already been evolved.

A test launch of the engine aboard a sounding rocket, which will achieve a flight regime of up to Mach 8, will take place some place in June at SHAR, Dr. Sivan said.

Government constitutes a five Member Committee to comprehensively review and give recommendations on the FRBM roadmap for the future

Government constitutes a five Member Committee to comprehensively review and give recommendations on the FRBM roadmap for the future

In pursuance of the Budget Announcement 2016-17, the Government has constituted a five Member Committee to comprehensively review and give recommendations on the FRBM roadmap for the future.

The composition of the FRBM Review Committee is as follows:

(i)Shri N.K. Singh, Former Revenue Secretary & Expenditure Secretary &Former Member of Parliament(Rajya Sabha) : Chairman

(ii)Shri Sumit Bose, Former Finance & Revenue Secretary: Member

(iii)Dr. Arvind Subramanian, Chief Economic Advised (CEA) : Member

(iv) Shri Urijit Patel,Deputy Governor,RBI: Member

(v) Shri Rathin Roy, Director, NIPFP: Member

The Terms of Reference (ToR) of the Committee are as under:

(i) To review the working of the FRBM Act over last 12 years and to suggest the way forward, keeping in view the broad objective of fiscal consolidation and prudence and the changes required in the context of the uncertainty and volatility in the global economy;
(ii) To look into various aspects, factors, considerations going into determining the FRBM targets
(iii) To examine the need and feasibility of having a ‘fiscal deficit range’ as the target in place of the existing fixed numbers(percentage of GDP) as fiscal deficit target; if so, the specific recommendations of the Committee thereon; and
(iv) To examine the need and feasibility of aligning the fiscal expansion or contraction with credit contraction or expansion respectively in the economy.

The Committee will make its assessment and provide its views on the expected impact of its recommendations on the General Government deficit and other FRBM parameters. The Committee will also examine and give recommendations on any other aspect considered relevant in relation to the determination and implementation of the FRBM roadmap. The Committee may be entrusted with additional ToR, if considered necessary. In this context, the Committee may consult Departments/Agencies of Government, experts and institutions, as considered necessary, and determine its own procedures.

The Budget Division of Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance will provide necessary secretarial and logistics support to the Committee.

The Committee shall submit its Report to Government by the 31st October, 2016.

Narendra Modi’s Iran visit to focus on boosting energy, trade ties

Narendra Modi’s Iran visit to focus on boosting energy, trade ties
Narendra Modi to make the 22-23 May trip at the invitation of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be visiting Iran over the weekend on a two-day trip that is expected to boost bilateral energy and trade ties besides giving a fillip to India’s connectivity plans in its extended neighbourhood.

India’s external affairs ministry announced the visit in a press statement on Tuesday in which it said that Modi was making the 22-23 May trip at the invitation of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani.

Modi and Rouhani have met earlier at Ufa in Russia, on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting.

Modi’s visit to Iran comes after his visits to the UAE and Saudi Arabia and ahead of trips to Qatar and Israel. It comes at a time of flux in the Middle East with the rise of the radical Sunni Islamic State militant group and an Iran freed of sanctions, which has made countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel wary of the rise of the Shia majority country.

“During the visit, the prime minister will call on the supreme leader of Iran (Ali Khamenei) and will hold talks on a wide range of subjects of mutual interest with President Rouhani.

“India and Iran share longstanding civilizational ties. Iran is situated in India’s extended neighbourhood and the two countries have significant overlap in their economic and security space.

“The visit of the prime minister to Iran will seek to build on these commonalities by focussing on specific cooperation in regional connectivity and infrastructure, developing energy partnership, boosting bilateral trade, facilitating people-to-people interaction in various spheres and promoting peace and stability in the region,” the statement said.

Modi’s visit will provide “a timely thrust to the ongoing efforts of the two countries and their business entities to expand bilateral cooperation and mutually benefit from new opportunities in the wake of lifting of secondary sanctions against Iran earlier this year,” it added.

Iran has been a major source of energy for Asia’s third largest economy even during the period when the US imposed crippling sanctions on financial institutions dealing with Iran, making it impossible for countries buying crude oil from the Shia country to pay their bills. The sanctions—aimed at curbing Iran’s allegedly clandestine nuclear programme—were lifted last year after Iran struck a deal with Russia, the US and its other Western allies to allow international monitors to inspect its nuclear facilities.

Earlier this month, India’s ambassador to Iran Saurabh Kumar was cited by media reports as saying that India was accelerating a plan to pay nearly $6.5 billion it owes Teheran for crude oil imports.

Turkey’s Halkbank has been identified to facilitate the payment and the money will be paid in euros, Kumar said.

Modi’s visit is also expected to see progress on New Delhi’s proposal for allowing ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL) to develop the Farzad B gas field in Iran.

OVL, along with Oil India Ltd and Indian Oil Corporation Ltd, had earlier invested about $100 million in the Farzad B gas field, but production could not be started as Indian companies found it difficult to stay engaged in the hydrocarbon sector due to sanctions imposed by the US and the European Union.

New Delhi conveyed to Tehran its interest to return to the project after sanctions were eased last year.

India is also keen on developing Iran’s Chabahar port which could ease India’s connectivity problems vis-a-vis landlocked Afghanistan. India is to equip and operate two berths in Chabahar Port Phase-I with capital investment of $85.21 million and annual revenue expenditure of $22.95 million on a 10-year lease. India, Afghanistan and Iran have finalised a trilateral transport and transit deal, which will allow Indian exporters to utilise the Chabahar Port, besides gaining access to markets in Afghanistan through Zahedan in the West Asian country.