The Service Tax provisions in the budget detail out 17 areas on which you will not be charged a tax, and for absolutely everything else that involves a service, you will need to pay 12 % (plus cess). The seventeen areas are:

1. 1. Services by the Government or local authorities: These will include such services like getting a passport, a driving license, paying municipal taxes, car registration fees, police fines and so on. What you pay for such services will not include any service tax.

   But of course, there are exceptions. Service tax will still be applicable on:
   - Speed or Express Post, and life insurance bought from a post office
   - airport services
   - government services provided to businesses. (Companies will pay it on the annual filing charges payable to the Registrar of Companies, for instance).

2. 2. Services by the Reserve Bank of India. They won't tax the ones that print the money!

1. 3. Foreign consulates and embassies in India. Hopefully this will mean to visa fees as well.

1. 4.

Pranab Mukherjee has presented a budget that has left everyone wondering what really happened and whether we should give it more attention than Sachin's hundredth hundred. But after you have replayed the highlights over and over again, you might find it less heartening to see that customs and excise duty are higher, and you're going to have to pay more to watch your cricket matches in future.

But it could have been worse. Budgets come with expectations, and in this budget, the Finance Minister has ignored way too many of them.

Expected, in this budget, were direct tax cuts — income taxes have been cut in some way or the other in the last few years. What we got was a tax hike of some sort. The government is struggling for revenue and facing high expenditure, and it has raised both excise duty and service tax to 12% (from 10%)  Also, now every service comes under the service tax regime, barring 17 areas (such as school education, government service and so on). In addition, the imposition

In the run up to the budget, and a few days after, the markets have reacted differently. The average budget day move, since 2000, is a tiny 1.08%. But that masks the volatility that the budget has seen, in both directions:

Bud Stock Moves

In the last two years, budget days have been incredibly benign and positive. In those budgets, we have expected, and got, tax cuts in various measures. In 2009, the expectations ran away, perhaps, as the markets toppled after both the interim and final budget presentations.

But are budgets usually positive? If you look at the budget moves from one month earlier to the previous day of the budget, and then onwards to one month after, is there a clear picture that emerges?

Bud And Stock Markets

There is no single direction the market has taken after the budget, based on its trajectory before the budget. In 2001, while the markets moved up more than 4% on budget day, they ended up falling 15% more in the subsequent month. The 2006 budget saw a flat budget day, and a benign period prior, and