News

indianexpress: Property prices in the city will go up making it difficult for middle and lower middle class to buy homes, say several builders and developers reacting to the budget presented by Finance Minister P Chidambaram on Wednesday. “It is a continuation of the policy of ignorance meted out to the industry,” was the general reaction from them.

According to D S Kulkarni, chairman and managing director of D S Kulkarni Developers Limited, the property prices in the city will rise by 15-20 per cent, which means middle-class Puneites wanting to buy houses will have to go to the outskirts like Saswad, Daund and even Talegaon. “Under section 80 I (b), flats with an area less than 1,500 sq ft in secondary cities and flats less than 1,000 sq ft area in metro cities can avail tax holiday benefits only till March 31. Coupled with it the increase in Works Contract — from 2 per cent to 5 per cent due to an increase of 2 per cent in tax and another additional 1 per cent as cess — will contribute towards the increase in prices,” Kulkarni adds.

Promoters and Builders Association of Pune president Lalit Kumar Jain too said the property prices would go up.

“We are treated as a service industry when we are a product industry. This year the supply of tenements in Pune is a mere 35,000. It will go down even further as no sops have been provided and the industry has been brought under taxation.”

His advice for Puneites was to buy houses now as the prices will shoot even further up in the future. Jain added that in metros, the prices of flats less than 1,000 sq feet and in secondary cities flats less than 1,500 sq feet in area will go up by Rs 40 per sq feet.

indianexpress: As the Finance Minister stated his intention to introduce the ‘reverse mortgage’ scheme for senior citizens through the National Housing Bank (NHB), Pune’s elders had more than one reason to cheer. For, the scheme has been formulated after imbibing suggestions recommended by the city’s leading senior citizen groups and in all likelihood will be introduced initially in the ‘Pensioner’s Paradise’.

“Pune is a very important market for this scheme as there are a high number of pensioners living in the city. As such, we have extensively consulted the city’s senior citizen forums and organisations like YASHADA, which have provided us inputs and suggestions,” NHB chairman S Sridhar told Newsline from Delhi.

Among the important suggestions that have been made are those pertaining to issues of medical problems during the period of mortgage. “When a person falls sick while his mortgage is on, he may need to avail of lump sum payments. This can be facilitated through the scheme,” says Lt Col M G Athavale, president of the Association of Senior Citizen Organizations of Pune (ASCOP). This proposal has been included as a provision in the reverse mortgage scheme.

ASCOP’s suggestion to allow a buyback of the mortgaged property by the senior citizen or their survivors has also been implemented in the draft scheme. The forum has also made a suggestion to extend the scheme to rural areas, by allowing reverse mortgage of land instead of a home. “People in rural areas need this scheme as their children often migrate to urban areas. A cooperative system can be worked out whereby such mortgaged land could also be tilled and remain productive,” said Athavale.

techtree: Corel has released the public beta of WordPerfect Lightning, a free word processing software that combines the benefits of online services with the features of desktop applications.

Delivering First Hybrid Productivity Platform, WordPerfect Lightning offers free access to premium online services, including collaboration and data storage, enabling users to take advantage of Web technologies without relying on Internet connectivity to accomplish key tasks.

It allows users to view, print, and save information, plus create notes and other simple documents, without purchasing a full-featured office suite. For more advanced tools, it offers one-click access to the full-featured Corel WordPerfect Office X3, in addition to a powerful array of online services.

Richard Carriere, General Manager for Office Productivity, Corel, said, “Today, we spend most of our time consuming or reusing content, taking information from one place, whether it s the Web, email, documents, or other sources, and incorporating it somewhere else. By blending desktop and Web applications in WordPerfect Lightning, Corel is taking a truly hybrid approach to computing, enabling users to maximize their productivity by making it simpler and faster to gather, organize, and share critical information.”

WordPerfect Lightning consists of four components: the Navigator, the Viewer, Lightning Notes, and the Connector. The Navigator is for organizing content. The Viewer is an all-in-one document reading tool for fast and simple viewing of documents in Microsoft Word, Adobe PDF, or Corel WordPerfect file formats. Lightning Notes is a lightweight word processor. The Connector, powered by Joyent, is a suite of Web-based applications for email, calendars, address books, and file storage.