Friday, January 12, 2007

Cheque with a cap?

Ever felt the need to have your cheque with a certain limit?

Suppose you pay around Rs. 1000 every month to your biller Mr. A. The amount is not fixed, but you know that it’ll be around Rs. 1000, or Rs. 1100 at the max.
You can’t frequently meet Mr. A to handover the cheques, and obviously you can’t issue signed blank cheques to him.

In this scenario, wouldn’t it be helpful to you, should you be able to issue post dated blank cheques to Mr. A, the only difference being that all the cheques will be “capped” to Rs. 1100? It means even if you issue signed blank cheques to somebody, he/she won’t be able to write any higher amount than your specified “cap”.

Incidentally, when I discussed this issue with my dad, he recalled some instances where a line e.g. “Under Rs. 51000” used to be printed vertically in red in some government issued cheques, which meant the max amount promised under that cheque was Rs. 51000.

I often felt the need of such kind of cheques while paying my mess bills, providing my brother with his pocket money etc.

Please feel free to share your thoughts and experiences.

Friday, January 05, 2007

Child Tax?

"You know in Philippines, there are only girls and girls everywhere" - a Philippines returned friend was telling me the other day.

He was clearly exaggerating, but ever wondered why does India have a sex-ratio well above 1.0 (sex-ratio = no. of males/no. of females)? Most of the countries other than the developing countries similar to India are 'rich' in terms of proportionate female population. The major contributor to this disparity is the so called 'khaandan ka chirag'/'वंशाचा दिवा’ mentality among us. Just look around and you’ll find couples willing to do ‘anything’ just to have baby boy and not a girl. It’s no wonder the freak astrologers, the babas etc. flourish.

In a more global scenario, facing a stiff shortage of skilled manpower, the whole developed world is looking at India’s huge pool of talent. In fact it’s time to forget the family planning, even though we are heading toward becoming the country with the highest population in the world. We just can’t afford to force limit our young talent. Look at Japan and China. Both have a large population density; still they are starving for more and more children. China has abolished the 1-child norm way back, as they have understood the importance of the new generations coming in.

Though we have been fairing pretty well on the population front, are we producing a ‘quality’ population? We often see that the well educated and financially sound people tend to have less children than those who are much poorer. The growing population of the economically backward class or of the BPL (below poverty line) is the big problem ahead of us rather than the overall population.

The nation cannot bear the burden of incompetent population. Every child coming into being should have some solvency. One shouldn’t produce just any number of children as he/she wishes and put extra burden on the nation. After all, the taxpayers’ money is used to feed the ‘insolvent’ population.

The need of the hour is to introduce kind of Child Tax. The parent’s must deposit, which could be refunded after the child turns 18 –say- Rs. 10k per each baby boy (girls can be spared till the sex ratio gets even) . This could well solve the above mentioned issues. First, as there’s no tax on baby girls, the sex ration will be in check. Secondly, only those children who could be well fed, well brought up will come into existing and help India prosper.

Look what just the two Ambanis are doing. Wouldn’t have –say- 5 of them been more helpful to the Nation?


-- Comments and suggestions welcome.