Sunil Sethi & Co. - Legislative Discourse

Why does the financial year start from 01, April

Christian Europe following the Julian calendar celebrated New Year's Day on 25 March i.e. Lady Day (to commemorate the visit of Gavriel to Myriam, informing her of Yeshua of Nazareth). Accounting practice from time immemorial also took the same view marking 25 March as the end of an accounting period. However, European scholars observed the drift in Easter (a seasonal event marking the resurrection of Yeshua) due to anomalies in the Julian Calendar. To restore and align the events associated with traditional dates, Pope Gregory XIII issued a Papal bull called Inter gravissimas ("Among the most serious") in 1582, marking Europe's switch to the Gregorian calendar.

However, the English had renounced papal authority in 1534 under the reign of Henry VIII and continued to follow the Julian calendar. In consequence, the Julian calendar by the year 1750 had lagged 11 days behind the Gregorian. The British Parliament acknowledged the practical difficulties created due to the inaccuracies of the Julain calendar and passed the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750. The Act adopted the Gregorian calendar from 1753 and elided eleven days from September 1752, thus resetting 21 March to coincide with the equinox. A vestige of the same remains in the UK's tax year, which ends on 5 April, or "Old Lady Day". The Act also rectified the start of the legal year (used for legal, financial and other civil purposes) from 25 March to 1 January, thus, restoring the Old Roman practice of beginning the year with 1 January.

Calendars of India

India recognizes two calendars, both of which are mentioned on the Gazette of India, first being the “Shalivahana Shaka Calendar” based upon lunar months with solar years and the other being “Georgian Calendar” introduced by Pope Gregory XIII.

Difference between Notification and Circular

Notifications refer to public notifications that let the general public know about laws and changes that are made by the government. Notifications are commonly issued by the Government to exercise the power of a legislative enactment. Mere notification in a gazette does not provide something the status of law. Term notification means bringing to the notice of the public. Publication in the Gazette implies, and it is assumed that it has been brought to the notice of the public at large, and none can take plea of being unaware or ignorant.

Whereas, circulars are more internal memos that provide clarification on certain laws or issues. They are often issued by a Ministry, a Department, or the Chief Executive that is in charge and is commonly used to clarify certain aspects of law.

Non-legislative actions

All non-legislative state actions, such as Press Notes, that operate as laws must usually fall into one of these two categories:

Delegated Legislation; or
Executive Action

Delegated Legislation contemplates administrative actions in furtherance of a statute and is an internationally accepted and established method of lawmaking. Essentially, delegated legislation proceeds from any authority other than sovereign power, and is, therefore, dependant for its continued existence and validity on some superior or supreme authority.

Executive Action contemplates actions taken by the Government in its sovereign authority. Article 73 of the Constitution states, in part, that subject to the provisions of this Constitution, the executive power of the Union shall extend to the matters with respect to which Parliament has power to make laws. This means that the Central Government can validly take executive action in all such areas where Parliament’s legislative power extends. It has been held by the Supreme Court that in the absence of any legal provisions to the contrary and vide Article 73, the Government does not require any legislative sanction or authority for exercising executive power. All Executive actions are subject to judicial review - but on limited grounds.

Office of Profit

‘Office of profit’ is not defined in the Constitution. However, in past judgments, the Election Commission has noted 'what constitutes an office of profit under the Government' and is now well established by a catena of judgments of the Supreme Court. Five tests have been laid down:

(i) whether the government makes the appointment
(ii) whether the government has the right to remove or dismiss the holder
(iii) whether the government pays remuneration
(iv) what the functions of the holder are, and
(v) does the government exercise any control over the performance of these functions.

Types of Legal Documents

Affidavits are affirmations on oath.
Undertakings are written promises offered as security for the performance of a particular act required in legal action.
Declarations are voluntary affirmations used in quasi-judicial and other administrative activities.
Bonds are legal document that shows the individual refraining, or undertaking from certain matters.
Agreements are a mutual understanding between two parties that may be written or verbal. It may not be enforceable in a court of law.
Deeds are a special document that legally binds two parties and clearly elucidates their rights and duties.

The Gazette of India

All Bills, Acts, Rules, Notifications, Orders, etc. of the Government of India are officially made public through publication in 'the Gazette of India'. It has four Parts which are further subdivided into Sections, with each Part and Section specifically allocated for a particular kind of notification.

Shorthand denotion for Assessment Year

Section 28 British Finance Act 1919 provided a new shorthand way to refer to the tax year: The expression "the year 1919–20" means the year of assessment beginning on the sixth day of April 1919, and any expression in which two years are similarly mentioned means the year of assessment beginning on the sixth day of April in the first-mentioned of those years.

What happens to the apartment owners when the building gets old and must be demolished and redeveloped?

The life of a building is normally taken as fifty years while financing a bank loan by bankers. So property value will depreciate by 2% per year. To be sure, there are two ways land ownership is determined in India for the purposes of 'a block of apartments' constructed on a plot. The flat/ apartment/ condominium owners must decide whether they wish to form:

An Association of Apartment Owners, (whether regd or not) wherein every apartment holder has proportional ownership of the undivided share of the land. The reason it is called 'undivided' is that one cannot bifurcate a specific area of the land and claim that that is theirs. For instance, you have 180 Sq. Yd undivided share but you cannot say where exactly this 180 Sq. Yd. land is. In the present case, all flat holders have to unanimously agree to redevelopment.
A Cooperative Housing Society (where more than 20 apartments as per the DCS Act, 2003), wherein the plot of land and the flats belong to the CHS. The flat owner is really a bearer of the shares of the society. The flat owner has 'permanent residency rights', which he can sell by transferring his shares to a new buyer, and so on. But the flat owner is not really the owner. As, the plot of land belongs to society. Society decides the redevelopment plan, etc. The rights of individuals are limited to voting on resolutions during the AGM. 66% majority is sufficient to carry the motion through.

Strata title is a form of ownership devised for multi-level apartment blocks and horizontal subdivisions with shared areas. The word "strata" refers to apartments being on different levels.

Freehold or Leasehold

Freehold and Leasehold

10 Documents to verify before purchasing a real estate

Freehold and Leasehold

Difference between Annexure, Schedule, Appendix, Enclosure and Attachment

Freehold and Leasehold

Inheritance Planning with regards to the Hindu Succession Act

Freehold and Leasehold

Why cases are registered against the Government as the 'Union of India'

Article 300 of the Constitution of India states that the Government of India may sue or be sued by the name of the Union and the Government of a State may sue or be sued by the name of the State. Whereas, the 'Republic of India' is preferred in international jurisdictions.

Republic, Sovereign, and Democratic

The term “republic” signifies that the State shall be headed by an elected official and not a hereditary ruler. All the powers that the head of the executive enjoys are derived from the constitution and there are no ‘inherent powers’ or ‘prerogatives’.

“Sovereign” means that India is a free country having the complete right to govern itself without any interference from any external source.

The term “democratic” conveys that the government is of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is a broad term that encompasses any machine that can perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence. ML is a specific subset of AI that involves teaching machines to learn from data, while deep learning is a subset of ML that uses deep neural networks (aka deep learning) to learn and make predictions.

Deep learning is a type of machine learning that falls under the category of supervised learning that involves training large neural networks on massive amounts of data. Deep learning workloads are often run on the below chips to make available a high degree of parallelism to accelerate AI tasks, such as natural language processing, computer vision, and speech recognition.

GPUs (graphics processing units)
TPUs (tensor processing units)
FPGA (field-programmable gate array is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturing – hence the term field-programmable) these chips are well-suited for certain AI tasks because they can perform parallel processing and can be reprogrammed in real-time.
Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE)

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) were commonly proposed as models of brain function in the 1970s, but no effective learning algorithms were associated with these proposals. The method of back-propagation through time appears in the PhD thesis of Paul Werbos (1974), and his later review paper (Werbos, 1990) gives several additional references to rediscoveries of the method in the 1980s.

In practice, modern neural networks are almost always trained with some variant of stochastic gradient descent (SGD).

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