CNBC Awaaz Report (Pehla Kadam)

“A Billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you are talking about real Money”

With the above motto in mind CNBC AWAZ, a Hindi news channel which is joint venture between CNBC and Television 18, based in Greater Noida came to Bhawanipur College, for its financial literacy show Pehla Kadam. The Anchor for the program Mr. Anil Singhvi was impressed by the fact that the college has a very active club, “Bull`s Eye” and an entrepreneurship club, “BEST” under the guidance of Prof. Vijay Kothari & Prof. Divyesh Shah.

Towards, the beginning of the program CNBC took interviews of Prof. Dilip Shah,Yash Dugar, Mehul Shah and Urmi Patwa, were asked for their views on financial literacy and Stock Market. Later, we had a panel discussion followed by a Q&A session. The experts for the event were Mr. Md. Amir Suleiman and Mr. An and Biyani (An Alumni of Bhawanipur College, 2001 Batch).

The discussion started with basic information on investing and compounding but with views put forward by students, Siddharth Dhariwal, Yash Dugar and Shashank Agarwal, the discussion got highly technical. Mr. Dhariwal put forth the idea of separate accounts for trading and investing. Mr. Agarwal, spoke about the idea of having the right balance in Mutual funds and Stocks, which brought a different enthusiasm in the discussion and the experts were surprised with the technical and sound knowledge student’s posses.

The experts spoke on various topics and major takeaways from the discussion were

• Savings is good at every age (Income – Savings = Expenditure), and not the other way around.
• What steps one should take after savings has been done?
• Cost of Inflation in Education is too high, so proper planning should be done, for educational expenses.
• Experts believed that one should go for perpetual SIP.
• Our investment should be divided in various sources like 20% in risk free investment and 80% in Direct Equity.
• Markets work on 3 Major forces – Sentiments in the short run, Liquidity in the Medium run and Fundamentals in the Long run.

After the discussion, we moved towards a Q&A session, where students like Kevin Doshi, asked how to convince his parents about investing in stock market, Urmi Patwa asked about the concept of Short-selling of stocks, Tania Agarwal, who has invested in Kishan Vikas Patra for 12 years, asked about other sources of investment and Yash Dugar has multiple questions on various stock market techniques and Kalicharan Shaw asked about benefits of Sukanya Samridhi Scheme and how to choose a Mutual Fund.

This was one of the most engaging, Pehla Kadam shows, in the history of CNBC Awaaz and it was not only an interesting experience for the students but also a rewarding experience. This show will be telecasted on CNBC Awaaz and students will have an interesting combination of knowledge and memories of this unique event.

All together it was an excellent learning experience.