A transparent assessment of the costs and risks associated with India's ambitious nuclear plans must be made before any ground is broken at Jaitapur or elsewhere. You really have to hand it to the nuclear industry. In any other sphere of the economy, a major industrial disaster is likely to have adverse, long-term financial consequences for the company or companies whose product or activity was involved in the accident, regardless of...

The gap between PAN holders and the number of returns filed was 617.1 lakh Biometrics uses biological method to identify physical features of an individual The government has decided to issue biometric PAN cards to Taxpayers across the country to weed out the problem of duplicate and fake ones. The decision was taken recently by the Finance Ministry, in the wake of a Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report that asked the Income...

The government has decided to issue biometric PAN cards to Taxpayers across the country to weed out the problem of duplicate and fake ones. The decision was taken recently by the finance ministry and it comes in the wake of a Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report that asked the income tax department to ensure that a single tax payer is not issued multiple cards. The proposed new biometric Permanent Account Number...

KJS Ahluwalia, a mine owner in Orissa, is the country's top taxpayer in the individual category for 2010-11. Two other mine owners from the state, Prasanta Ahluwalia and Indrani Pattnaik, also figure in the top 10 Taxpayers' list. Income tax officials in Rourkela said Ahluwalia, owner of an iron ore mine and a mini steel plant in Keonjhar, paid Rs 50 crore as advance tax in the last quarter. He paid...

The Fukushima disaster has prompted calls to review legislation passed by the Indian parliament in August 2010 that capped compensation payable, in the event of a nuclear accident, at 320 million U.S. dollars. "Fukushima showed what the potential damage from an accident could be," M.V. Ramana, physicist and well-known commentator on nuclear energy safety issues, told IPS. "The economic damages [at Fukushima] must have certainly exceeded the compensation allowed in the nuclear...