Telecom War: Now It Is a Fight to Finish
This refers to your cover story on telecom (The Battle for India, April 23). It was a colourful presentation of battles with eyes for their market supremacy. Though telecom is a sunrise industry, the effect of new generation mobile telephony services has not permeated strongly on economies due to policy aberrations, and scandals. While there are enough reasons against Reliance Jio for its present business pattern as it stands to subsume other competitors and restricts their industry share - resulting in merger of Vodafone and Idea and pushing down the ranking of Airtel, the blame cannot be apportioned only at the doors of Reliance Jio, as other operators prior to this evidently indulged in cartelisation and forced the users to unwillingly toe their lines. The preferential treatment of post-paid customers against pre-paid users raises ethical concerns against such operators. There are mixed signals about the contents of services of these telecom companies. However, there cannot be two opinions about the implementation of economic objectives and business norms by all the operators. To protect the user interests from trap, the TRAI and the Centre have prohibited Jio's three-month concessions. Any development in telecom business design should enable the customers to have the last laugh for lasting big business viability.
B. Rajasekaran, Bangalore
Aadhaar Linking Is More Dangerous
This refers to your article on Finance Bill (A Show of One-upmanship?, April 23). Former finance minister P. Chidambaram has rightly said that "Aadhaar was an instrument to extend services and benefits it was never intended to be tagged to income-tax returns and bank accounts" And linking of Aadhaar compulsorily with PAN on the plea of eradication of black money does not hold good in a wider sense. Password is enough for safeguard for filing of ITRs. When net banking/financial transactions are based on password, then how ITRs cannot be treated safe with passwords? The misuse of password, if any, is more dangerous for financial/net banking transactions than ITR filing. Aadhaar details can be easily cracked by any person. Recently, cricketer M.S. Dhoni's wife Sakshi had complained about the leakage of Dhoni's Aadhaar card details. Implementation of Aadhaar is against Supreme Court's earlier decision. Also, it evades the right to privacy, guaranteed under the Constitution, for every citizen of India. In larger interest of the country, Aadhaar must be abandoned once for all. The use of Aadhaar is justified only for criminals.
Mahesh Kapasy, New Delhi
Sanctity of Laws Being Watered Down
This refers to a column (Finance Bill 2017: Asserting the Boundaries of Law-making?, April 23). The BJP is crossing its limits of powers in the name of national interests, by including non-finance and non-taxation amendments in the Money Bill to get them passed in the Lok Sabha without any debate. This is just to avoid the Rajya Sabha where BJP does not have enough strength. And by this way, the sanctity of laws passed by Parliament is being watered down. Probably, BJP is no better than Congress on such matters.
M. Kumar, New Delhi
Step to Avoid Multiple Taxes on a Single Commodity
This refers to your article on GST (Dashed Hopes, April 9). Definitely, GST at 40 per cent, against the earlier agreement for 28 per cent, is a bad idea. Such a high rate in GST makes the whole purpose of simplification and lower taxes as redundant. Also, multiple rates of GST would lead to litigation over which item falls in which category. And there should be statutory provision that once a commodity is taxed under GST, no other tax/cess will be levied for that commodity. This is to avoid future possibility of multiple taxes on a single commodity.
Mahesh K., New Delhi