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Economic Times
3 days ago
- Business
- Economic Times
CBIC outlines detailed procedures for review, revision, and appeal for orders passed by Common Adjudicating Authorities
The CBIC has established clear procedures for review, revision, and appeal of orders issued by Common Adjudicating Authorities, addressing jurisdictional ambiguities arising from multi-state DGGI notices. The Principal Commissioner or Commissioner of Central Tax will act as the reviewing authority and handle appeals. This move aims to streamline processes and reduce litigation uncertainty for industries facing extensive GST investigations. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads The Central board of indirect taxes and customs (CBIC) Tuesday outlined detailed procedures for review, revision, and appeal for orders passed by Common Adjudicating Authorities The move aims to eliminate jurisdictional confusion for cases where companies have received complex, multi-state notices from directorate general of GST intelligence (DGGI), where the lack of defined appellate authority created procedural delays and litigation instruction specifies that Principal Commissioner or Commissioner of Central Tax under whom the Common Adjudicating Authority is posted will serve as the reviewing authority under Section 107 of the CGST same authority will also hold revisional powers under Section sections deal with taxpayers appeal against the demand or against orders from the Common Adjudicating Authority will lie with the Commissioner (Appeals) having territorial jurisdiction over the Principal Commissioner or Commissioner of Central Tax under whom the authority is Principal Commissioner or Commissioner of Central Tax will represent the department in appeal proceedings and may appoint a subordinate officer to file departmental said this will help industries receiving multiple notices and reflects the government's evolving commitment to procedural fairness in high-stakes investigations across sectors."This circular will have far-reaching implications across sectors frequently targeted in large-scale GST investigations, including banking, insurance, online gaming, hospitality, real estate, FMCG, manufacturing, and logistics," Rajat Mohan, Senior Partner, AMRG & Associates said.
RNZ News
4 days ago
- Politics
- RNZ News
Principals warn Ministry of Education they can't work with new interpretation on how schools are considered 'open'
High school principals are warning they can't work with a new Ministry of Education interpretation on how schools are considered "open for instruction". Secondary Principals' Association vice-president Mike Newell spoke to Alexa Cook. Tags: To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.
Hindustan Times
18-06-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
Mahashtra introduces Hindi as 3rd language in schools, move sparks backlash
Hindi will now be taught as the third language in English and Marathi medium schools in Maharashtra from classes 1 to 5, the state government said on Tuesday. According to the government order, Hindi has not been mandatory and will 'generally' be the third language. However, if at least 20 students per grade want to study any language other than Hindi as a third, the schools have an option to opt out. The move, which aligns with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, drew sharp criticism from not just the Opposition but also Marathi language advocates, who accused the government of giving a 'backdoor' entry to the policy after initially backtracking, reported PTI. Congress, which is in opposition in the state, accused Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis of "stabbing" the Marathi people in the chest. The order gives an option to schools to opt out of teaching Hindi if 20 students from each standard wish to learn some other language. "Those who wish to learn any other language as an option to Hindi, should meet the expectation of 20 students from each standard in a school. In such a situation, a teacher for that particular language will be made available or the language will be taught online," the order read. If a demand of teaching any other language arises, either a teacher will be appointed or the language will be taught online, the order added. For schools that follow other mediums of instruction, the three-language formula must include the medium language, Marathi and English, the order said. The fresh move by the Maharashtra education department comes in contrast to what the state's education minister said earlier. When the Maharashtra government tried to bring the three language policy earlier this year by introducing Hindi from class 1, it was met with severe backlash. Following this, state's School Education Minister Dada Bhuse on April 22 said that Hindi will not be compulsory. 'The decision to introduce Hindi from class 1 as a third language was taken earlier. However, many parents have suggested it be introduced from class 3 instead. We will consider these suggestions before taking any further decision," Bhuse said at an event in Pune last month. He added that the three-language formula was 'on hold' and that the schools will operate under the current two-language system for now. However, the fresh move by the state government contradicts Bhuse's statements. Deepak Pawar of the Mumbai-based Marathi Bhasha Abhyas Kendra called the action 'nothing but the backdoor imposition of Hindi'. "The government has betrayed the Marathi people. If we remain silent now, it will pave the way for dismantling the federal structure and the legacy of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement," he said in a social media post According to Vasant Kalpande, former chairman of the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education, it will be difficult for the students at such a young age to understand the nuances and differences between Marathi and Hindi scripts and that it is not likely to find 20 students in a class who want to study some other language than Hindi. "The provision to make teacher available online is also an attempt to discourage opting for any other language than Hindi," he said. He also pointed out that in Gujarat and Assam, which are also BJP-ruled states, Hindi is not a mandatory third language in schools. Maharashtra Congress president Harshwardhan Sapkal slammed chief minister Devendra Fadnavis and said he has 'once again stabbed a dagger into the heart of Maharashtra'. He called the option of opting out of Hindi 'a pretense of choice while a deliberate conspiracy to impose Hindi!' 'This is nothing but BJP's anti-Maharashtra agenda, a plot to destroy the Marathi language, Marathi identity, and the Marathi people. It is clear from this that the loyalty of Fadnavis, Shinde, and Ajit Pawar lies not with Maharashtra or the Marathi people but with the rulers in Delhi,' Sapkal said in a post on X. 'The Shinde faction, which repeatedly invokes Balasaheb Thackeray's name, controls the education department, yet they have stabbed a dagger in the back of Shiv Sena, just as they have taken a contract to murder Marathi.' 'Ajit Pawar is so desperate for power that he cares little whether Maharashtra, the Marathi language, or the Marathi people live or die. His only policy is to secure the finance department for himself,' he added. With PTI inputs.
IOL News
16-06-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
From Uprising to Soft Power: How 1976 Shaped South Africa's Struggle and Its Co-option
June 16 has been memorialised in state ceremonies and school textbooks, but often stripped of its radical potential, writes Gillian Schutte. On the morning of June 16, 1976, thousands of Black schoolchildren in Soweto marched peacefully against the apartheid government's decree that Afrikaans be used as a language of instruction in schools. It was not just a protest about language - it was a refusal to be culturally colonised, a rebellion against the daily indignities of Bantu Education and systemic dehumanisation. The apartheid police responded with gunfire. The murder of children in broad daylight - most iconically captured in the image of Hector Pieterson's body being carried through the streets - shocked the world and shattered any illusion of the regime's legitimacy. The uprising quickly spread beyond Soweto. Within days, townships across the country were in revolt - Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Durban and others echoed with the chants of youth refusing to bow to white rule. The state responded with tear gas, batons, bullets, and mass detentions. Apartheid officials reported 500 people, many of them teenagers, were killed in the unrest that year. The number of deaths is said to be much higher than official records. Teenagers were thrown into solitary confinement for months at a time, and many were brutally tortured. The regime was exposed as not only racist but murderous. And the youth, once dismissed by apartheid authorities as controllable, had become an ungovernable force. Many fled into exile to join liberation movements such as the ANC and PAC, swelling the ranks of the armed struggle and political education. The brutality of the crackdown was widely condemned. Media coverage and public outcry surged across Europe, the Americas, and the Global South. For the first time, liberal democracies that had tolerated apartheid for decades found themselves under immense pressure from civil society and student movements to divest, boycott, and speak out. Pretoria's image abroad was in tatters. Even its staunchest allies in the West realised that the optics of slaughtering children was unsustainable. This moment triggered a significant tactical shift in how the apartheid state - and its Western sponsors - would manage opposition going forward. The gun had failed. Repression had bred rebellion. The next phase of the counterinsurgency would not rely solely on force, but on persuasion. The terrain of struggle moved from the battlefield to the hearts and minds of South Africans. This pivot mirrored broader global strategies of Cold War soft power, particularly those employed by the United States. Where outright military suppression was too costly or controversial, the West deployed cultural, educational, and economic tools to manage political outcomes in the Global South. South Africa became a laboratory for these experiments. USAID, established under the Kennedy administration, began to reframe its activities in South Africa. Rather than just economic development, its mission included 'democracy promotion' and 'civil society strengthening' - innocuous phrases that masked deep ideological work. Under these programs, Black youth were recruited into leadership workshops, community development initiatives, and training schemes that promoted liberal, non-violent values over revolutionary consciousness. Vocational education replaced political education. Human rights replaced collective liberation. Similarly, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US government-funded proxy for the CIA, started operating in South Africa during the 1980s. Its funding flowed to media platforms, electoral reform initiatives, and NGOs that framed their work in donor-friendly, non-confrontational language. These organisations criticised apartheid - enough to appear progressive - but avoided challenging capitalism, white wealth, or US imperialism. German political foundations followed suit. The Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (aligned with Germany's Christian Democrats) and Friedrich Naumann Stiftung (aligned with the Free Democrats) poured money into South African civil society, shaping liberal intellectual discourse, funding legal reform NGOs, and sponsoring dialogue platforms. Their aim was not to destroy apartheid's economic architecture, but to transition South Africa into a post-apartheid dispensation that would retain capitalist order and white economic dominance under the veil of multiracial democracy. These interventions marked the birth of a soft coup - the gradual neutralisation of radical resistance through donor influence, media manipulation, and ideological infiltration. This was the counter-revolution wrapped in NGO language. It was no longer tanks and tear gas. It was television studios, grants, scholarships, and training programs. The new foot soldiers were consultants, not soldiers. Silencing the language of radical change A similar fate would later befall the students of the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements. These were the children of June 1976's legacy - once again standing up against institutional racism, Eurocentric curricula, and economic exclusion. But as with their predecessors, their revolt was gradually professionalised. Donor-funded NGOs and foreign-backed think tanks began to absorb key leaders, offering them fellowships, internships, and platforms that steered them away from revolutionary demands. What began as fierce critiques of structural violence and colonial legacies was quickly reframed into career-building exercises in 'policy reform' and 'youth dialogue.' The language of radical change was replaced with 'stakeholder engagement,' and a new class of young Black professionals emerged - not to dismantle the system, but to manage it. By 1994, the foundations of the neoliberal South Africa were already cemented. Liberation had been negotiated, but the terms were not drawn up by the oppressed. The economy remained in white hands. The land remained dispossessed. The ANC, now transformed from liberation movement to ruling party, was encircled by donor logic, Western debt traps, and a civil society already restructured by decades of soft power. The irony is bitter. The blood of the youth in 1976 forced the world to see apartheid for what it was - a murderous regime bent on white domination. But that same uprising also accelerated the global regime's adaptation. It taught them that guns alone would not suffice. They would need to shape the minds of South Africans - to raise a generation of Black liberals rather than revolutionaries. June 16 has since been memorialised in state ceremonies and school textbooks, but often stripped of its radical potential. The children who marched did not ask to be co-opted into donor-funded development programs. They demanded dignity, land, justice, and power. Their rebellion should not be remembered as the beginning of reconciliation, but as the signal that the time for half-measures was over. Today, as South Africa confronts deepening inequality, youth unemployment, and the hollowing out of liberation promises, it becomes increasingly clear that the struggle never ended - it was only rerouted. To reclaim the spirit of 1976 is to see through the tactics of soft power, to resist the seductive language of donor dependency, and to once again place African sovereignty at the centre of liberation. *Gillian Schutte is a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media. IOL Opinion
IOL News
16-06-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
Youth Day, June 16: Comparing 1976 to 2025
Police watch as pupils demonstrate in Soweto during the 1976 uprising. Image: IOL archives By Adv Mahlodi S. Muofhe Let me detour for a moment from the collective amnesia of many South Africans who believe stoically that the Soweto Secondary and High School students on that fateful 16 Wednesday June 1976 day when we took to the streets of Soweto in the cold morning to march in protest, we were marching to demand jobs or job opportunities from the white apartheid economy which thrived in its business endeavours because the protectionist apartheid labour laws enabled it to do so. Far from it. We were in our teens when we took the revolutionary steps to march in protest against the then Bantu Education system which was hellbent on domesticating us, as black students. The apartheid government in all its forms of diabolical anti-transformative education polices had already succeeded in deploying our parents to "kitchen girls and garden boys" at their places of work by feeding them the rotten education syllabus. The apartheid government contemporaneously commenced with their policy which implored that all black students in schools in South Africa from Form One to Form Three (JC) then, would have to study their content subjects implying that mathematics, physical science, geography, biology and history would have had to be taught in Afrikaans, the language we detested as that of our apartheid oppressors language which we neither understood nor comprehended. We who were, at the time in 1976 in Form Four and Form Five, were exempted from learning these content subjects in Afrikaans. The (apartheid government's) sole purpose of imposing Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in black schools wasn't to educate us for the future so that upon completion of our tertiary or vocational educational studies, we could also be creators of jobs and job opportunities, it was meant to condemn to the world of perpetual job seekers as we would have dropped out from school without having grossed Form Five (Matric). During that period in 1976, we barely had dreams about entering the job market. We had genuine ambitions to complete our primary to high school education system so that we could either go to various universities or technical colleges to acquire more professional knowledge in preparation for us to fully participate in building our democratic South African economy post the attainment of our new democratic South Africa which we knew would dawn in our lifetime since in underground structures of our then banned liberation movements like the ANC and PAC, some of us were already moles thereof. That our economy is misfiring and not performing optimally is as a consequence of inter alia our neglect back then as South African of some of the 1976 cohort of students who fell through the cracks post June 16, and found themselves drowned by the apartheid economy which remunerated them poorly such that when they became family persons, others couldn't afford to educate their children all the way to universities and technical colleges as a result, their children became hasslers and that process replicated itself so much that out of 20 countries globally with the highest unemployment rate of youth, we (South Africa) came at number four with 49.14% ( We didn't preach the importance of going to school then vigorously. We are continuing in the same trajectory today in the name of the youth of Soweto June 16, 1976 where we want the youth of today to think that they must go out there and look for jobs and job opportunities which are not there. We fought for quality education in 1976. Critical essential education to match the needs of our economy is what we should embark on vigorously. Our youth that is those who succeed to summit university qualifications and technical qualifications, often study qualifications which are not fit for purpose the outcome of which keeps on increasing the pool of the high number of unemployed youth in South Africa. It now not an anomaly to see students who have just qualified as medical doctors, lawyers and accountants queuing at various robots in the City of Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town carrying placards indicating that they have completed their degrees and yet they cannot find employment. This is a crisis which requires that South Africans must put their heads together with the leadership of our institutions of higher learning and try to cure the problem of mismatch of our education system with what our economy needs. * Adv Mahlodi S. Muofhe, admitted advocate of the High Court of South Africa. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
