Last week in a nutshell
“The govt. is a sleeping partner while we are the working partner”
At a recent BSE event, a stockbroker from Mumbai asked Nirmala Sitharaman, the finance minister of India, a question that she literally could not answer. Keep scrolling for the full story.
Will Chabahar Port be India's next victory over Pakistan
India has signed a 10-year deal with Iran to operate the Chabahar port, a strategic project first proposed two decades ago. We recently doubled down on this deal, allowing us to tap into the central Asian markets. We had a shot at it in 2016, but US sanctions on Iran slowed this down.
This deal will give India a seamless transit route for Indian goods and products to Afghanistan by avoiding the land route through Pakistan.
GPT 4o is born, but its parents are gone
OpenAI has recently launched GPT-4o, which promises remarkable advancements in producing human-like speech. Mysteriously, a day before the launch, Jan Leike who led the development of GPT4o announced his resignation from OpenAI.
You take the risk, the government gets rich
Once upon a time, at a BSE event in Mumbai…
On Tuesday, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman was grilled by a stockbroker about India's heavy taxes. The broker's critical questions went viral in a video.
He pointed out that various taxes, like GST, IGST, stamp duty, STT, and long-term capital gains tax, are eating into investors' profits. He argued that the government was making more money than brokers and called the government his…
"sleeping partner"
To this, Sitharaman jokingly replied, "A sleeping partner cannot answer sitting here." But is the government mooching off investors?
₹25,000 crore from STT alone
Last year investors flooded the stock market and the benchmark indices touched new highs, the government earned 25% more from the tax on selling listed securities, a top official said.
The Income Tax Department collected ₹25,000 crore in securities transaction tax (STT) till end of January, compared to ₹20,000 crore collected in the same time a year ago
But, it's not just the stock market...
Even when you're buying a house, a significant portion of the payment ends up going to the government in taxes. When purchasing a house you have to pay additional costs like stamp duty and GST, which add up to 11% of the property's value. This means that 11% of your money is spent just on taxes.
