The decision of the GST Council to levy a GST of 28 percent on the entire turnover of online gaming is plain wrong. It is bad in principle, against settled jurisprudence, harms a burgeoning industry with enormous potential for jobs and innovation, and, most perversely, carries an inbuilt algorithm to depress overall tax collections. It should not stand.
Riots spread from a suburb of Paris to over 300 towns across France, after the police shot dead a teenager of North African descent, Nahel Marzouk, in a traffic stop that proved one too many for the alienated, unemployed, ill-educated youth of immigrant stock, subjected to routine racial profiling by the police. The police have had to arrest thousands of people, including minors before a semblance of calm returned to the land of liberty, equality and fraternity.
IT might seem a stretch to argue that corporate governance and bank asset quality depend on cleaning up India’s political funding. But it is not. It is simply the cold, hard truth. And since that reform is yet to happen, all talk of a robust financial sector and SEBI’s incremental success in reforming corporate governance is as hollow as the claim that India, long driven by caste hierarchy and grossly unequal distribution of social and cultural power, has democracy in its DNA.
Support Uniform Civil Code to strengthen democracy, especially gender equality
The World Bank has forecast slower world growth, for the current year and the next, at 2.9% and 3%, respectively. Emerging markets and developing economies, which normally gallop ahead of the rest of the world, are expected to grow at just 3.4% this year, with Covid- and zero-Covid-afflicted China growing at a rate slower than the US for the first time in 40 years or so. Does this cripple India's chance of growing at least 7%? It does not, and not because the World Bank pegs India's growth rate at 7.5%, higher than the Reserve Bank of India's own estimate of 7.2%.
Infrastructure hopes to ride on the government's commitment made in the budget to spend big on infrastructure. The government must live up to this commitment. Action by GoI on two other fronts is crucial as well, to sustain the gathering growth momentum. One is energy, the other is social peace.