Birds of Raniganj

A list of birds I have seen from my garden

1. Pigeons
2. Doves
3. House Sparrows
4. Common Tailorbirds
5. House Crows
6. Cormorants
7. Egrets
8. Parakeets
9. Oriental Magpie-Robins
10. Greater Coucals
11. Black Kites
12. Owls
13. Woodpeckers
14. Bayas
15. Asian Koels
16. Red whiskered bulbuls
17. Red vented bulbuls
18. Common Myna
19. Babblers
20. Common Kingfishers
21. Rufous Treepies
22. Purple Sunbirds
23. Asian Pied Starlings
24. White-browed Wagtail
25. Purple-rumped Sunbird
26. Stork-billed Kingfisher

27. Black-shouldered Kite 

28. Common Hoopoe 
29. Brahminy Starling

30. Golden Oriole 

The 'Must-Not-Read' List

Over the years, I have realised that no good comes from reading up on certain issues. I avoid such stuff. As soon as my eyes hit on a keyword below, I close the page, uninstall the app, unfollow the tweeter, throw away the newspaper, or close the book, as the case may be. Doing this has increased manifold the time available to read up other things. So without my ado, here's my 'Must-Not-Read' List. Do feel free to suggest more keywords.


1. Indo-Pak Relations, Hindu-Muslim Relations, Kashmir Dispute, Article 370, Uniform Civil Code, the Ayodhya thingy.

2. Anything related to the economies of England, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan or Zimbabwe.

A Nature Lover edits TOI post

The Times of India recently posted an article on what it called 'Elephant Menace'. My edited version below:

KANNUR: The threat of wild elephants human encroachment is a perennial issue in the forest terrains of the district, bordering Wayanad and Karnataka, despite various efforts by the forest officials to prevent it. 

There were many instances of wild elephants people encroaching into human elephant habitat and destroying crops forests not only in Aralam, a spot persistently targeted by the elephants humans, but also places in the interiors of Iritty and Cherupuzha, in the last couple of months. 

Documentation is critical

What worked for Watterson may not work for you. Jot down your plans, documentation is critical.

GST

by CA. Sandeep Choudhary 

If you are getting ready for the Goods and Services Tax (GST), take a deep breath, Baba Ramdev style, and relax. GST is not going to come into force from 1st April 2016, irrespective of what the Government of the day claims.

To begin with, there is the easy part: writing down the law. 

You first need to pass the bill for amending Constitution amendment bill in both Houses of Parliament. (No, you can't call a joint sitting for a Constitutional Amendment). 

Then get the bill ratified by at least
half of states. 

Then comes the formation of the GST Council (consisting of the Union Finance Minister, his deputy and the state FMs). This Council will be immediately faced with the critical issue of determining what the GST rates (or bands of rates, or floor rates) will be. This, and all other matters, such as decision on which taxes are to be subsumed in GST, has to be passed by three-fourth majority (Central Government will have one-third of voting power). 

Let us assume for a while that all this will happen breezily. 

Now, you need to pass the Central GST and Inter-state GST bills in Parliament. This will subsume (not wholly, but substantially) Central Excise Act, 1944 and Chapter V of Finance Act,1994 (a.k.a. Service Tax legislation). Meanwhile, the GST Council will come up with a model State GST Bill for the states. Then, each state will pass the State GST bill in their respective legislature. 

After the basic law is in place, the detailed Rules and Regulations governing technical nitty-gritty and Forms will have to be issued by both Centre and the States. 

At this point, you may be wondering if we have enough time, and political sagacity, to write the law by 1st April 2016. We do not even have a timeline yet, for each of the steps. 

Today, on 17th June 2015, the Govt. has formed two committees, one to monitor progress on these issues. And another to recommend possible tax rates. So, lets assume they can come up with a timeline. And stick to that timeline. 

If they can stick to the timeline, they would have covered the easy part: writing the law. 

By this time, we will be putting in place IT systems to handle the Inter-State GST. And training the Tax Officers in the new law. All this is also quite easy. 

At some point in the game, the TRADERS will wake up and realise what GST means. And all hell will break loose. 

That's the fun part. The chaos against which the wrangling over legislation will look like a breeze.  

GST has been sold as a single tax. It is not a single tax. It is 3 separate taxes. A tax chain exclusively of Centre. A tax chain of States, with Centre as facilitator. And an additional tax on inter-state sales and services, collected by Centre for benefit of selling State. 

Currently, a trader bows before the state officers collecting VAT. He does not have to deal with central officers collecting Excise (and Service Tax).  Once GST kicks in, the Trader will have to bow before the Central authorities too. 

For the same sale, there will be two parallel valuations, returns, assessments, demands and appeals. One under the Central GST, the other under State GST. Manufacturers suffer this in the current regime, but not traders. 

And traders are the backbone of BJP. 

Parallel to the traders, service providers will realise that they will have to bow before State GST officers apart from Central. They will join in the fun. But it is the Traders that will be giving the Government sleepless nights. 

GST will not be a unified tax. It will not provide credit for all taxes on inputs. Big revenue generators- petroleum products and liquor, will remain outside GST. It will not remove the inter-state barriers which force large chunks of inter-state trade underground. It will not make India a unified market. 

And it will dramatically INCREASE the cost of compliance for traders and service providers.

What happened to 'Ease of Doing Business', they will ask. 

I suppose Arun Jaitley Ji will be a worthy successor to Pranab da, but that is another story. 

The Importance of Understanding Underlying Concepts

Once your concepts are clear, the answers come easy.

Cost of Measurement

Expected benefit from measurement must exceed cost of measuring

Flying Patterns of Birds

Greetings from the world's most ill-informed birder. Here, I share notes on flying patterns of different types of birds. An earlier post discussed Birding with Descriptive Placeholders.

The most understandable flying pattern is that of the pigeons- they make their mind as they fly. Your friendly neighborhood pigeon will flap its wings a few times going in one direction, then abruptly turn into another, then stop flapping for a while, then start flapping furiously.

Birding with Descriptive Placeholders

Greetings from the world's most ill-informed birdwatcher: I don't know the names of many birds beyond kavva and kabootar.

I find my way around by giving them descriptive names, such as 'that bird with red buttocks that eats the guavas before they ripen' or 'that shiny small black bird with hologram like skin that eats something from that white-flowered tree in the adjoining plot'. The rickshaw-walla cum guide at Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary finally enlightened me that the first is a bulbul. The second I still do not know.

Once you know the name of the bird, you can quickly find out else. So, now I know that there are two different types of bulbul in my garden. One has a red posterior but is otherwise dull in color. The other has thick black streaks coming down the neck from both sides like shawls of South Indian politicians, white chest, red patches a little below the eyes, apart from the red color below. The first is the red - vented bulbul. The second is the red - whiskered bulbul.

On Butterflies and Wider Roads

I commute along the G.T. Road (NH-2). For a small stretch between Raniganj and Andal, trees along the road were home to a humongously large number of butterflies. If the weather was good, I could make out a hundred odd butterflies. Sometimes, over two hundred.

Life blooms in unexpected places. This is an industrial area in the Raniganj- Dhanbad coal belt; air pollution is high, with factories belching out particulate matter in copious quantities. One does not anticipate this environment to support butterflies. My hypothesis was that the pollution affected more adversely the birds and other animals that would otherwise prey on butterflies. As I write, I wonder if some particular pollutant had a stimulating effect.

While most butterflies remained at a height, a couple would come lower, darting across the windscreen. Once, one hit my windscreen, slided down, and got stuck in the wiper. I carefully disengaged it, and placed it on a small plant a few feet away from the road. It immediately flew away! I did not they were so resilient.

Rather curiously, no one paid any attention to the butterflies. At least, I never heard anyone talk of them.  But then, you can't see butterflies if you are cramped inside an over- crowded bus. Nor if you are reading pink papers in the rear seat of your car. So, the butterflies became my own little secret.

My interest in butterflies increased. I read up a bit on what the butterflies liked. The tips were simple, and they worked. This winter, my garden had a much larger number of butterflies. It was immensely satisfying.

Then, somebody decided that four lanes are not enough for such a vital road. It is true, four lanes are not enough. It is the Golden Quadrilateral, after all. So, the road is being widened. And the trees that stood between the industrial area and the road are all gone.

I wish I knew someone, anyone, who had seen the butterflies there. I could share notes and lament the loss. But in so far I know, they were only my secret.

The construction company seems to be doing a neat job-- chop off the branches, then the top of the trunk, then the rest of it. Dig a  trench the width of a lane, throw the soil away. Then fill the trench with some other type of sand, and a sturdy road make.

It is all heavily mechanized, large machines swiftly working. Every week or so, a small track is blocked for their work. And one by one, they return that track with a wider road. Really wider road. Wow! The road is getting pretty wide.

Correction, the road is getting wide. It is not the job of a road to be pretty.

As a commuter on that road, the widening suits me. It is not just about for smoother driving and less honking. As I drive down the widened road, there is empty road to my left, empty road to my right, empty road ahead and empty road behind. It is as if I am the king and they have cordoned away rest of the traffic.

And then suddenly I am on the stretch they are yet to widen, and it is so irritating. If you thought adding two lanes to a 4-lane road would improve traffic by only 50%, you need to read about Queuing Theory.

I guess it is a good thing that the road is being widened. One should not get all weepy-weepy over butterflies. We have too many obscurantists doing such weird things, don't we? People who keep criticizing progress in the name of conserving environment and protecting endangered species. I wonder how they earn a living. Foreign funding, probably.

Yet there is hope for progress. A species is endangered only as long it is not extinct. With time, we will prune the existing list. And add the butterflies.

India has had enough people who alternate between crawling and flying off the handle. They drink in the nectar of prosperity while their kin try to chew away its powerhouses. We cannot remain cocooned in backwardness, it's kinda embarrassing in international fora. India needs to take its rightful place in the comity of nations. And the trees are in the way.

Beware! For your heart still beats for the beauty of nature, and finds respect for those who struggle to preserve it. Clean up your mind, get your facts right. There are no free lunches, development comes at a price.

Butterflies aren't even the price of development. In India, elephants enjoy that privilege.

I like elephants, I really do. I understand this is not a competition. I also understand elephants would not interpret it as enjoying a privilege. Yet for no particular reason, I wish butterflies were the price of development.

FAQ on Numbers in Jayalaitha case

This is the third post analysing HC verdict acquitting Jayalalitha. My first post  summarised the numbers. The second post  pointed errors in the computation.

Here, I summarise my answers to issues raised by lawyer Vikram Hegde , Journalist Indulekha Aravind and others relating to computation.

1. Why should discrepancy upto 10% be permitted?

Supreme Court came up with the idea, it is not stated in the statute. In Krishnanand v. The State of Madhya Pradesh [AIR 1977 SC 796], the accused had an unexplained income of Rs. 11,349. Justice P.N. Bhagwati noted 

"...the excess is comparatively small - it is less than ten per cent of the total income of Rs. 1,27,715.43 - we do not think it would be right to hold that the assets found in the possession of the appellant were disproportionate to his known sources of income..."

A lot of commentators have observed that Justice Bhagwati could not have imagined that a verdict given in the context of a few thousand would be used as a precedent in a case involving crores. 

However, it must be appreciated that Valuation is a tricky business. When you are estimating, say, cost of constructing a property 5 years ago, you can only hope to give a reasonable estimate. Bias of investigator can compound the problem. Objectively speaking, a 10% leeway is on the lower side.

2. How did the error of Rs. 13.5 crores happen?

The first item in the table is a loan of Rs. 1.50 crores. My guess is that the person totalling the table entered 15.0, instead of 1.50, in his calculator. Normally, such an error would be pointing out by the other side. The Public Prosecutor alleges that he was not given enough time.

3. You suggest that loan should be reduced from assets, not added to income. But there is no provision for that in law.

The law does not provide for reducing loans from assets. The law also does not provide for adding loans to income. Now, since loans are directly relevant to the matter, they should surely go somewhere. If law is silent on the issue, we should be guided by custom and logic. Both require that loans be reduced from assets, to determine a person's worth, and then compare it with his/her income. The High Court has added loans by stating simply 'Loans as Income'. There is no such thing as 'Loans as Income'.

4. What is the basis of decrease in estimated values of assets?

The Karnataka High Court reduced the cost of construction from Rs. 27.79 crores to Rs. 5.1 crores. Essentially, the valuation done by DV&AC was rejected. Then, the HC added the total constructed area of all properties, and applied a rate of Rs. 280 per square feet on the total construction. 

Arithmetics in Jayalalitha case revisited

In my previous post, I explained the numbers behind Jayalalitha's acquittal. Basically, assets got valued downwards, while income and liabilities got re-estimated upwards.

There are 2 major issues that arise from the numbers:

1. There is a totalling error of Rs. 13.5 crores in liabilities on page 852. Adjusted for this, explainable assets fall from Rs. 34.76 crores to Rs. 21.26 crores. Meanwhile, unexplained income rises from Rs. 2.82 crores to Rs. 16.32 crores. So, unexplained assets are 76.76% of explained. Not to put too fine a point to it, this is somewhat above the 10% threshold.

2. The court has added loans to income. Loans are not income. If a person has some assets and some loans, they need to be netted off to examine whether or not the (net) assets are disproportionate. Let us for a while ignore the arithmetic error in preceding para, but group the loans of Rs. 18.17 crores properly. The assets then fall from Rs. 37.59 crores to Rs. 19.42 crores. Meanwhile, income falls from Rs. 34.76 crores to Rs. 16.59 crores. The difference of Rs. 2.83 crores is 17% of known sources of income, not 8.12%

Jayalalitha Vedict explained

The Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption (DV & AC) had valued total assets at Rs. 66.44 crores, while estimating income for past few years at Rs. 9.34 crores. Thus, there was a case of assets being disproportionate to the known sources of income. 

The Karnataka High Court re-estimated cost of construction from Rs. 27.79 crores to Rs 5.1 crores, a reduction of Rs. 22.69 crores. Expense in marriage of foster son was re-estimated from Rs. 6.45 crores to Rs. 0.28 crores claimed by Jayalalitha in her IT returns, reducing assets further by another Rs. 6.16 crores.

With these reductions, total assets now stand at Rs. 37.59 crores. 

Meanwhile, the court noted that there were bank loans of Rs. 18.17 crores in the names of various entities. Income from ‘Super Duper TV Pvt. Ltd.’, a TV company with no channels, was estimated at Rs. 1 crores and that from ‘Jaya Publications’ at Rs. 4 crores. ‘Gifts’ were estimated at Rs. 1.5 crores. Income from Grape Garden was estimated at Rs. 0.46 crores, with some more income from ‘Sasi Enterprises’ and rent. Total income, or more appropriately, total explainable assets, now stood at Rs. 34.76 crores, a jump of Rs. 25.42 crores. 

Thus, only Rs. 2.82 crores is unexplained. This is merely 8.12% of Rs. 34.76 crores. The High Court felt that such a small difference- less than 10%- is not sufficient ground for holding someone guilty. There is a precedent for granting acquittal if disproportionate assets are less than 10%. 

Valuation of assets, after all, is an estimate.  

[To read the verdict, go to http://karnatakajudiciary.kar.nic.in/noticeBoard/CRL-A-835-838-2014.pdf. Start from page 913.]