Thank you murambi for the response. I am sorry if I didn’t explain it properly. I am still new to maya and don’t know a lot of proper terms. Ok here are the screen grabs. “Chopper 1” has an image plane used as a BG. In “chopper 2” I added a sphere around the whole scene with an outdoor image mapped to it. As you can see in the render, the ground plane lost its transparency and became black. I didn’t change any other settings. I spent almost 4 hours last night on it and finally gave up thinking that you cannot use an image plane for BG environment and a sphere with an image as a surrounding environment for reflections and indirect lighting together.

Then today I created a new file and re did the entire process, and it seemed to have worked fine as you can see in “chopper3” and “chopper4”. I know I must’ve been doing something wrong here, but I don’t understand, just adding the surrounding environment caused the ground plane to loose its transparency. I am still unable to solve this problem in that file.