Tag: policies

Reduction in Stamp Duty rates

Prasad AjinkyaLeave a comment
Stamp duty in Maharashtra

In a move to bolster real estate sales, the Maharashtra government has announced a reduction in stamp duty rates of up to 2-3%.

As a new home buyer, this is an opinionated piece and somewhat of a warped perspective. However, I will try to be as objective as possible and hope to give enough citations to qualify my stance.

What is stamp duty?

Stamp duty is the additional charge that you will have to pay if you are buying a home anywhere in India. Depending on the state you are in, this stamp duty is payable at different stages in the home buying journey.

In Maharashtra, the stamp duty is to be paid upfront when you are doing the home down payment. In other states, such as Karnataka or Telangana (I am mentioning these because these are the two fastest growing states in terms of real estate) this stamp duty is to be paid on possession.

Why is this so important?

Well, most people end up saving for buying their first homes. Unless if you have access to super awesome payment plans and offers such as the home down payment assistance of HomeCapital, the majority of their savings end up being spent for buying that first home.

A stamp duty is usually levied on top of the agreement value. So in Maharashtra whenever you buy a home, not only will you be paying the usual 5% GST, you will also have to pay a 5% stamp duty as well. This pretty much puts the cost of the home at 110% of the agreement value. This is not even factoring in the cost of the broker, the registration fees, the home loan processing fees. If you add that up, the cost of the home is often 115% of the agreement value.

Stamp duty is 30% of this chunk. This chunk of expense is usually not visible to the average home buyer, until the point of purchase. That means you realize that you have incur additional expenses when you commit to buying a home.

Reducing this stamp duty from it’s 5% to 2-3%, the Maharashtra government has reduced the overheads of home buying.

So … what is the actual impact?

This is the question that a lot of us are asking. The actual impact if you are purchasing a home anywhere in Maharashtra, is a 60% reduction in stamp duty (that’s 2-3% of the agreement value). So, if you were to purchase a home worth 1Cr INR (roughly USD 140,000), then the net benefit you are getting is 2-3 Lakhs INR (roughly USD 3000-4000).

Would this impact real estate sales in the long term? No. In the larger scheme of things, this is but a drop in the ocean that’s not the painful part. In the smaller scheme of things, there might be some speculator transactions hoping to cash in on the “opportunity”.

Having just finished the worst quarter in the last 20 years, the sales are bound to rise. As the industry slowly recovers to its pre-COVID numbers, this small respite is a precisely that. It’s a small reprieve and pretty much nothing else. After 10 years, no one will remember this move, however, if this move were to solidify into the norm … then this would be interesting to see.

Conclusion

I think the government needs to look at the larger issues of access to affordable capital. Granting a small reprieve is not really an incentive to the industry.

The short term transaction upheavals would be an issue, and this hurts the same industry more than actually helping. However, most state governments have historically shown to be myopic and short sighted .. due to the nature of their terms and I cannot really fault them for this. So, like all things in the past 4 years, this shall also pass.

Google Plus banned my Profile

Prasad Ajinkya8 Comments

I am trying to develop a regular rapport with this Google+ since I believe that over a period of time, this will affect in a big way on how search results are displayed to users. I do not have definitive stats which indicate that a person in higher number of circles result in higher SERPs, but this is a gut feel and more on that later. Visiting Google+ and engaging on the social network is part of my daily agenda. If you are a blogger, you should try it out some time.

However, when I logged onto Google+, this is what I saw on the top of my screen

Google+ ban

So I did what any normal person would do.

I raged. Then I calmed down and tried to reason with the system as to why this could be the case. After reading through the myriad of support articles that were linked in the notifications, the only action one could do was delete all content that I had submitted and submit the profile for review.

Google Suspension

After submitting my profile and waiting for a day, the good folks at Google decided that my profile was still violating some of their policies.

As a user, it would have been great if they could clearly point that out, however much to my chagrin there has been no actionable point from Google. Big Brother wants to disable my profile and that’s the way it would stay. An automated system is a good thing, but an iron wall is bad … I cannot even question why my account was suspended … the two documents that suggest probable reasons are Google+ User Content and Conduct Policy and Name Policy.

The former suggests that I have uploaded some content which could be hate comment, spam, …. the later suggests that my name does not seem genuine. I don’t know which allegation is more disturbing. I would love to contest these allegations, but there is no committee with whom I can take this up with … there is simply a red notification about the ban.

I have always been a Google Fan-boy, perhaps I still am, but this system makes me question their approach at trying to launch a social network. If you are spurning away your active users, how do you propose to get more users to stick to your social network?

RBI and the poppycock it calls vision

Prasad Ajinkya2 Comments

Got to see a peek at the IT Vision document of Reserve Bank of India, thanks to a tweet by a friend. Go ahead, read it, I am not going anywhere. I will save you the effort though, I can summarize it in one word.

Hogwash.

In more colloquial terms, Bullshit.

There cannot be a more generic document which meanders around superfluously. It touches upon literally all the peripheral topics which one can bring up when the words Information Technology are mentioned, but it fails to take a stand on any topic.

I gave them the benefit of doubt and went to the Contact Us section of their website. After I keyed in a longish feedback to their vision document, when I submitted the request, I got a very nice error message (shown below)

Capture

Great execution of the vision RBI! Not only have you declared that your vision for technology is a blurred mixture of all corporate jargons, but also one of the most basic functionalities on your website is not working.

Further reading on the report informed me that a committee had been setup to create the vision document. Committees are the perfect excuses for being faceless, blameless and gutless. You do not have to take any stand and you do not have to do any work.

Good job o ye Banker of Banks!

1984 to 2010

Prasad Ajinkya6 Comments
1984

We are in the process of formalizing our IT and Electronic Access Policies. In this process, often the team drafting the initial proposal finds it pretty easy to switch to the Orwellian mode of 1984, wherein Big Brother is always watching.

Although the intent of these people often stems from the fact that they desire to protect both the system and it’s users, but that sometimes requires that extra bit of control. However, it becomes extremely difficult to tell the need for control from genuine to paranoia.

Further, due to some unforeseen events happening in the recent past, these rules are doubly strict ensuring that the past mistakes of a few have to be borne by the entire team. Only to ensure that something that happens out of the blue should not happen again (and rightly so!).

The problem at hand is how to ensure that people are enabled to work and co-create with each other, but are still protected from any malicious ill will that might exist outside (and even within the system). How can Big Brother start co-operating instead of watching?

One clear method is to assume that all people are good and need to be enabled. The other is to work closely with them step-by-step and layout a simplified process and get the end-user buy-in on each of the steps. Till that happens, Big Brother will continue to exist … we are watching you!