Vol 8 Issue 1
Regn. no. M A H E N G/2004/15104
Jan-Feb 2011
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“An age employed in
edging steel, Can no poetic raptures feel” www.ngoconnect.org
A ‘SHAKTI’ PROJECT
- Philip Freneau
I n d i a ’ s Fi r s t N G O N e w s ta b l o i d CONNECTiNG The Jaitapur disaster nvironmentally conscious citizens have been shocked at the conditional clearance for the Posco steel project in Orissa, in flagrant breach of the Forest Rights Act. But a bigger, more flawed project, was cleared two months back with equally vacuous and irrelevant conditions. Jaitapur, in Maharashtra’ s Ratnagiri district, is expected to be the world’s biggest nuclear power station and generate 9,900 MW (India’s current nuclear capacity is 4,780 MW).
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It will be based on the untested European Pressurised Reactor (EPR), not approved anywhere including in France, where the financially troubled nuclear company Areva designed it. The project is being imposed on a beautiful ecosystem, a segment of the Sahyadris where the Krishna and the Godavari originate, with a flourishing farming, horticultural and fisheries economy. It lies in one of the world’s 10 greatest biodiversity hotspots. Only an irrational mind would want to risk degradation of this region to build nuclear reactors that will displace 40,000 people, disrupt water flows and uproot fruit-yielding trees. Seismicity is also of concern. Jaitapur is an earthquake-prone area, with a rating of 4 on a 1-5 scale. This violates an official committee’s recommendations against locating hazardous industries outside Zone 2. Yet that’s what Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL), a subsidiary of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), is doing. It zeroed in on Jaitapur in 2003, assuming the site would be approved; the DAE always prevails. Jaitapur’s six proposed EPRs were cleared in an extraordinarily sloppy Environment Impact Assessment by National Environmental Engineering Research Institute that has no competence in seismic or nuclear safety-related matters. It evades biodiversity issues and generation and storage of large quantities of radioactive wastes. The EPR’s safety design is problematic because of its large (1,650 MW) size,. Finnish, French, British and US nuclear regulators have raised 3,000 issues about its safety. The NPCIL has now decided to import six EPRs, ignoring the generic problems with nuclear power. ..The EPR produced power will be costlier than Enron, Rs 5-8 per unit. Jaitapur’s highly literate people are dead against it as it will destroy livelihoods and expose them to the dangers of nuclear power. More than 95% have refused to take compensation for forcibly acquired land, despite it being raised from R1.6 lakh to R10 lakh an acre. The government has unleashed savage repression against the resistance prohibiting peaceful assembly’. None of this has broken the people’s resolve --the nuclear juggernaut is allowed to roll. It must be halted. Praful Bidwai
Indefinite accumulation of funds by NGOs Of Herman Schher and solar power model
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he proposed Direct Taxes Code has various new points which NGOs should check.
The law pertaining to the accumulation of income of NPOs is quite complicated and it is important to understand the various options available. NPOs currently are permitted to accumulate 15% of their annual income indefinitely. In other words, every year an NPO has been provided with the benefitof creating long term fund to the extent of 15%. It may also be noted that the 15% of income so accumulated is not required to be spent in future. Therefore, it is as good as a corpus. DTC WITHDRAWS INDEFINITE ACCUMULATION The 15% indefinite accumulation has been totally withdrawn in the proposed Direct Tax Code (DTC). This is probably the harshest provision of the DTC. In future, NPOs cannot accumulate even a single rupee from their current year’s income, they have to utilise 100% of their income. Re. Accumulation Utilisation in next 1 year--under the existing law, apart from the 15% indefinite accumulation as discussed above,
Jairam Ramesh’s pro-POSCO decision
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he report presented by Jairam Ramesh is nothing but a capitulation to corrupt forces both within India and abroad. After all POSCO, though a Korean company, is held largely by American corporations,. For the single largest project FDI investment in India at 2005 prices (Rs. 51,000 crores or USD 12 billion capital cost), analysis reveal that this investment can be recovered in less than a decade given the pittance of a royalty that POSCO will pay for iron ore extracted. (Rs. 30/- tonne at the official ore valuation of Rs. 300/tonne, compared with the commercial value of Rs.7,000/tonne). It is to make such unprecedented profits from the plunder of India’s natural resources that POSCO demanded a coastal location for its super large ships to be berthed to cart away our precious iron ore. What India would be left with is the toxic residue of its dirty ore processing, while the refined ore (perhaps not even the finished steel) would be exported to Korea and elsewhere to add more value to POSCO’s profits. This is not merely a flight of the nation’s natural wealth but also a massive planned political exercise for erosion of financial resources with questionable legal sanction.
if the NPOs want to accumulate current year’s income to be utilised in future years, it can only defer the utilisation by 1 year or 5 years. The NPO can accumulate the income for 1 year if the money is received towards the end of the year or it is unable to spend for legitimate reasons. In such cases, the NPO can just write a letter to the Assessing Officer (AO) and utilise the amount in the next year. The amount so utilised in the next year will be deemed to have been utilised in the previous year. The NPO could also accumulate the income for 5 years if 85% of the income is not utilised within the year. The NPO has to file Form 10 with the Assessing Officer (AO) and can utilise the amount in the next 5 years. However the proposed DTC proposes that only 15% of income could be accumulated for the next 3 years (Earlier 15% could be accumulated indefinitelt and 85% for 5 years. With the DTC there will be no indefinite accumulation and only 15% for next 3 years. This provision may cause hardship to NGOs who are getting funds for long-term projects spanning several years.
less than 85% is utilised during the year, after DTC- NGOs will have to pay tax if less than 85% is utilised.(excerpts from Standards and Norms—www.fmsfindia. org .or contact Sanjay Patrra mfogla@yahoo.com)
NGOs with Rs 50 cr revenue must follow accrual accounting.. The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) has recommended that all nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) that have gross revenue of, and above, Rs 50 crore must follow accrual system of accounting account for all receipts and expenses as and when the transaction happens - to maintain transparency in public money. There is a serious need of financial control in some NGOs operating in the country-- as it is important to curb money laundering and suspected terrorist financing, accounting regulator ICAI has said in its report on the Accounting and Reporting Requirement of NGOs submitted to the ministry of corporate affairs last month.
Currently there is no tax liability if The struggle against POSCO in Jagatsinghpur will continue. This is a struggle to expose the most corrupt and socially and environmentally disastrous deal ever legitimised in India’s history. POSCO ---Pratirodh Sangram Samithi. Contact Prashant Paikray, Spokes person 09437571547 prashantpaik ray@gmail.com.
solar power they needed, and to sell the remaining power to the agent. The agent acted as an aggregator of such power which he then sold to the power grid at a guaranteed price of 15 cents per unit for a period of 20 years.
Solar power as a win-win
(d) Today 2% of Germany’s power comes from such solar generating units. On sunny days it is as much as 10%. And its share is likely to increase dramatically.
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ermann Scheer, the pioneer of Germany’s solar feed-in tariff (FIT) policy, died on October 14, 2010. And in his passing away, the solar power industry lost a great visionary, and a champion of green energy. He was the prime mover of FIT, which was first explained in Germany’s 2000 RES Act. What Scheer did was to create a set of laws that: (a) Allowed each rooftop of each house to be fitted with subsidised solar panels. (b) Allowing for the creation of agents who would fit such panels on rooftops of houses, allow households to use as much of the
(c) In just eight years, the solar power industry in Germany employed more people than the automobile and engineering sectors.
As a result, by 2009, feed-in tariff policies got enacted in around 63 jurisdictions around the world, But what makes Germany unique is that it allowed every household to become a power generator.This is of critical significance to a country like India, where there are more buildings per square kilometer than in most countries in the world, and the rooftop suddenly begins to have both economic and national significance. As Germany’ s experiment gained momentum, the cost of photovoltaic or PV solar power modules to fall from an unacceptable high of almost $30 per watt of installed capacity to less than $3 and slated to fall to $1. Solar electricity costs too are continuing to fall. By making every house a power generator, Germany effectively did away with the exclusive monopoly of a few producers to enter into (often cozy) relationships with government owned grids. India could do with this type of policy because it would make every house in every city a power producer.
Iit is time now for PPSS to actively challenge this gross violation of Constitutional Rights, Statutes and Norms, dubiously legitimised by Jairam Ramesh ignoring substantive findings of Enquiry Committees that he himselft constituted.
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According to the accounting regulator, there “is need of one single regulatory authority for all NGOs” as currently they are established under different laws ranging from Societies Registration Act to Trust Act. This leaves a wide regulatory gap and hence helps in laundering the public money, an ICAI source said. There are two kinds of funds received by the NGOs— restricted funds and unrestricted funds. Restricted funds are purpose specific. The ICAI has suggested that these NGOs must follow “fundbased accounting”, which means that there should be a separate bank account for restricted funds and the NGOs must maintain a separate balance sheet, income and expenditure account and cash flow statement. ”This will help in curbing funds diversion,” the source added. The regulator has also suggested that it should be made mandatory for NGOs having gross revenue above Rs 50 crore to follow all accounting standards framed by the ICAI while those having gross revenue up to Rs 50 crore may follow the standards subject to certain relaxation by the ICAI.-...Shruti Srivastava(Source www.indianexpress.com/) At the village level, solar power could do wonders. Since power is already being offered to rural areas, at highly subsidised rates, the government could work out a method whereby they could capitalise the subsidy amount for the next 15 years, and actually allow a reverse-bidding process to set up the most cost effective solar plant. On a typical day running costs of solar power station are zero. A village with 10,000 houses would need a 1 mw farm which generates power during the day to feed pump sets and sends the excess to grids for city consumption. The electricity board can charge the panchayat only for the net power consumption (if any!) by the village which will be a strong motivation for the village to both conserve and maintain the facility. Moreover, since there would be little need for power transmission lines, the capex and recurring costs in maintaining gridlines up to villages could be avoided. The amount saved could be used to finance rural solar power plants. Overnight, the country’s dependence on coal and diesel for powering electricity plants would diminish. Thus, India could create more jobs, decentralise power generation, reduce capex on transmission and distribution lines, and even make households earn some money for the surplus power they sell to the grid. Equally important, it allows India to reduce the amount of pollution coal-based thermal power plants are known to cause. -- R N Bhaskar. ( Source : http://www.dnaindia .com) ***