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www.caonline.in News... 1.Section 94-A(1) is constitutional valid.[Madras High Court T. Rajkumar and Others vs. UOI and Ors. (Madras HC)]. 2.Sec. 40 (a) (i) is discriminatory and not applicable to Indo-US DTAA. [CIT vs. Herbalife International India Pvt. Ltd (Delhi HC)]. 3.Get ICAI now mobile app for latest ICAI updates. Available on android, iOS, windows and blackberry 10. To download please visit: - http://www.icai.org/mobile. 4.15.05.16 (Sunday) is last day to file TDS/TCS returns for Q4 of F.Y. 2015-16. TDS statements to be filed in 31 days from F.Y. 16-17. 5.The Income declaration scheme 2016 and the direct tax dispute resolution scheme 2016 expected to come into force on 01.06.16.CBDT press release of 12.05.16. For more News Like us on https://www.facebook.com/caonlineofficial Or Subscribe on mail visit : www.caonline.in

Relaxing norms, the Centre on Friday allowed lakhs of its employees to take advance money four months ahead of commencing journey under Leave Travel Concession (LTC) rules. A government employee gets reimbursement of tickets for to and fro journey, in addition to leaves, when he avails LTC. The existing rules allow an employee to draw advance for LTC journey for himself and his family members 65 days before the proposed date of the outward journey. Since the ministry of Railways has decided to increase the advance reservation period for booking accommodation in trains from 60 to 120 days, the time-limit for drawable of LTC advance by the government servants may be increased from 65 days to 125 days in case of journey by train, an order issued by the department of personnel and training (DoPT) said. The cases where the LTC journey is proposed to be undertaken by other modes of transport viz air, sea or road, the time-limit for drawing LTC advance shall remain 65 days only, it ...

The Supreme Court judgment upholding the validity of criminal defamation squanders away a brilliant opportunity to strike down this Macaulay drafted law of 1837. The judgment, by a bench headed by justice Dipak Misra, is verbose and clearly loses the wood for the trees. Before the judgment was heard, justice Misra had freely granted stay orders against defamation prosecutions. The case was heard for two odd weeks and the judgment was delivered some nine months later. In cogitative hibernation for long, the gestation did not prove worth waiting for. Like a goods train, it gathers material at every stop, rocking to the sound of its track. Drafted in 1837, India’s criminal defamation law was borrowed from English common law for imperial purposes to defend the state and state officials and put down comments by the press and the freedom movement. Macaulay differed from criminal law in four areas: India’s criminal defamation was not linked to breach of peace, did not allow truth as a...

Cabinet clears intellectual property rights policy to boost innovation The Cabinet has approved an intellectual property rights policy aimed at strengthening the regime and improving infrastructure. The policy, a long time in the making, names the department of industrial policy and promotion (DIPP) under the commerce ministry as the nodal body for the government’s IPR push. The policy would act as a road map to coalesce existing laws, DIPP Secretary Ramesh Abhishek said. Accordingly, administration of the Copyright Act, 1957, and the Semiconductor Integrated Circuits Layout-Design Act, 2000, have been brought under DIPP. A cell in DIPP will facilitate creation and commercialisation of IP assets. The policy aims to increase IPR outreach, speed up approvals, enhance commercialisation, and enforce norms, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Friday. Customising IPR programmes for various sectors and reaching out to traditional knowledge holders will be focus areas. A baseline...

The new and renewable energy ministry has released draft guidelines on development of onshore wind power projects. The ministry has sought comments from all stakeholders by May 27 on draft guidelines. With advancement in wind turbine technology and the rules of CERC (Central Electricity Regulatory Commission), CEA (Central Electricity Authority) and other regulatory bodies, comprehensive guidelines are needed for the development of onshore wind power projects, the ministry said. The installed wind power generation capacity was around 26.8 gigawatt (Gw) by the end of FY16. India is globally placed at the fourth position in terms of wind power installed capacity. The government has set a target of reaching 60 Gw of wind power installed capacity in the country by 2022. Business standard New Delhi, 14th May 2016

Confident of clearing up the bad-loan mess, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan on Friday said there is “absolutely no chance of a Lehman moment” in India, and a three-cornered firewall was being created to safeguard the economy from external shocks. He also rejected calls for any immediate privatisation of public sector banks and said the urgent need was to clean up their balance sheets. Rajan, who has often been criticised for being too economical with rate cuts, indicated that rate cuts were not the only instrument to boost growth. “I think the real way we are trying to firewall the economy is, on the first hand, with good policies, including as I said, the moves on reforms that have been enacted recently. The second is by trying to increase the maturity of our debt. We have substantially increased the maturity of debt, external debt that we owe. The third is we built-up reserves,” he told CNBC. Asked about bad loan problem in India being bigger than the size...

Trademark registration in just one month, check on film & music piracy India unveiled a comprehensive Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) policy on Friday aimed fostering innovation, cutting delays in clearing patent, trademark and copyright applications, protecting traditional knowledge and encouraging entrepreneurship. The National Intellectual Property Rights policy, which the Cabinet approved on Friday, will likely bring India’s IP regime in line with global standards and help improve its ranking in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business index. The new policy will also help substantially cut the time taken on clearing the backlog of intellectual property rights (IPR) applications from the current five to seven years to 18 months by March 2018. Trademark applications will likely get approved in one month by 2018, from 13 months currently. “The policy aims to create and exploit synergies between all forms of intellectual property (IP), statutes concerned and agencies,...