INFRA

While the cosmetics market and its customers wrestle with new age-defying and age-reversing concepts and products, there is one market segment that has actually discovered the fountain of youth. Over the three decades, the grey has been gradually leaching out of the Indian home buyer's profile, leaving full heads of natural black hair and unwrinkled faces in its wake.

Gone are the days when only the elderly could or would buy homes on the back of their life savings. Thirty years ago, the typical Indian home buyer was invariably aged above 50 and cashed in his or her provident fund to finally make the dream of homeownership come true.  

New Delhi: The government has warned builders of stringent action for asking customers to make entire payment before July 1, the day of GST roll out. It asked them to pass on the benefits of lower tax under the new regime by way of reduced prices or installments.
In a release issued in New Delhi, the Finance Ministry said that construction of flats, complex, buildings will have a lower incidence of Goods and Services Tax as compared to a plethora of central and state indirect taxes suffered by them currently.

aid at each stage of production or service delivery can be availed in the succeeding stages of value addition. This makes GST fundamentally a tax only on value addition at each stage.
This means that the end consumer will thusThe switch-over to the GST regime is undoubtedly one of the biggest tax reforms in post-independence India.  From July 1 2017, GST effectively cuts through a confounding Gordian knot of taxation complexity in the country. In other words, it replaces the multiple taxes levied by the central and state governments and will become subsumed of all the indirect taxes, including central excise duty, commercial tax, octroi tax/charges, Value-Added Tax (VAT) and service tax.

New Delhi: While news of Metro breakdown make to newspapers, other woes related to city transport system seldom get reported. On one hand technical glitches in Metro lines seem to have become a regular affair for commuters using the corridor; on the other side, the story of other modes of the transport is no better.

Delhi is growing extremely fast with separated zones for living, working, studying, shopping and leisure. As a result, people need to travel fairly long distances requiring them to use motorised vehicles. They are bound to share auto-rickshaws, cabs, DTC buses and e-rickshaw rides in hazardous conditions.  

In its seven decades of journey since independence, the real estate and housing sector, has come a long way from early years of restrictive policies, deficient planning and highly inadequate resources, to reach a progressive, planned, organised and reformative stage, facilitating urban transformation and speedy economic growth.

 The present government's vision is to ensure long term inclusive development through good governance and transformative reforms to boost real estate, housing and infrastructure - the vital sectors that hold key to economic development. It is a far cry from early years after independence (1947 – 64), when not much attention was paid towards housing/urban infrastructure due to lack of resources and staff capacity to design and deliver. But, it was during this period that the government introduced state housing boards, mandated to construct houses for public and laid the ground for planned cities and subsequently Chandigarh &Gandhinagar came into existence in 1952 and 1960 respectively. 

In Indian real estate today, the untrained eye may see a dichotomy in the massive investments pouring into the Indian residential sector and the actual on-ground demand for housing. A similar question mark was, in the past, also attached to the fact that developers kept churning out projects despite the visibly reduced uptake over the last couple of years. The fact is, there are always at least two storylines unfolding - the first and most obvious is the short-term story.