Most members of the monetary policy committee (MPC) argued for front-loading interest rate hikes in view of rapidly rising inflation during the off-cycle monetary policy review earlier this month - the minutes of the meeting published on Wednesday showed. In early May, the rate setting committee met unscheduled and unanimously decided to hike the repo rate by 40 bps. This was the first repo rate hike in four years, and an inter-meeting hike in more than a decade.
Prices of food items like cereals, pulses, and edible oils rose or remained steady in May, a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) report said, indicating there could be another higher inflation print. However, it observed that the Monetary Policy Committee's (MPC's) surprise move to increase interest rates bodes well for its credibility. The RBI's monthly State of the Economy report, released on Tuesday, citing high frequency food price data from the Ministry of Consumer Affairs for the period May 1-12, said the increase in the prices of cereals was primarily because of the surge in wheat prices.
An analysis of WHO data shows that most of the countries with an older cohort of population and higher in the development index had a lower excess mortality rate than India.
Recently, Enforcement Directorate (ED) attached assets worth Rs 757.8 crore of Amway India Enterprises in connection with an alleged marketing scam. It claimed that Amway was running a multi-level marketing scam. The ED provisionally attached immovable and movable properties worth Rs 411.83 crore and bank balances of Rs 345.94 crore from 36 different accounts belonging to Amway. Data from the Department of Economic Affairs shows that in 2021-22 (until December 2021), ED had provisionally attached Rs 8,989.3 crore worth of assets.
State governments need to focus on building charging infrastructure to realise the goal of transitioning a large proportion of their sales to EVs, reports Ishaan Gera.
Shareholders of the six listed Future Group companies voted on Wednesday. Bankers said all the large lenders had rejected the proposal.
It has been over two decades since the cabinet cleared the BharatNet project, earlier known as National Optical Fibre Network. However, progress of the programme has been slow. While the government had set the target of connecting 100,000 gram panchayats by 2013, it took another four years to achieve this target in December 2017. Progress under the current administration has improved, but the government has again missed its targets.
Axis Bank's acquisition of Citibank's consumer finance business for Rs 12,325 crore - the second biggest deal in the Indian banking sector - is seen as a good deal at a good price. The acquisition enables Axis Bank to close the gap with competition in some key segments such as credit cards. At the same time, there are some key issues that are crucial for the deal's success, apart from the fact that it will take some time for Axis to reap the full harvest of its investment.
After selling dollars for the past few months, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) may take a hands-off approach before its annual account closing by not trying to prop up the rupee as geopolitical tensions show signs of stabilising with global crude oil prices easing from its $140 peak. The central bank was a net buyer of dollars between April and September, and then turned a net seller in the following months, the data released by the RBI showed. The RBI continued to be a net buyer of $36.6 billion in this fiscal year - between April and January. In 2020-21, it purchased $68 billion on a net basis.
Re-elected MLAs from the ruling party added more wealth in the last five years than re-elected candidates from other political parties, shows an analysis of ADR electoral data.
With the banking regulator lifting restrictions on HDFC Bank's digital initiatives, the largest private sector lender is now girding up to launch a clutch of customer-facing applications (apps), which will act as stepping stones in its journey to morph into a technology (tech)-led bank from a conventional one. Following repeated outages in its digital offerings, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had barred HDFC Bank from issuing new credit cards in December 2020 and prevented it from going ahead with its digital launches. The embargo on issuing credit cards was lifted in August 2021 and the ban on digital launches was lifted last week.
Last year, in a reply to a question in Lok Sabha, the government informed Parliament that as of 2021, an estimated 13.5 million Indian nationals resided in various countries outside of India. Of these, 8.8 million were in the Gulf countries. Given the pandemic, there hasn't been a significant change in the number of Indians settling abroad, but data between 2015 and 2018 shows that the number of Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) increased 18 per cent in these three years. In 2015, India had 11.4 million Indians settled abroad, which increased to 13.4 million in 2018.
By the end of December 2021, India had 389 million users who did not have access to mobile Internet, while there were 765.8 million mobile Internet users in the country.
'We now understand things that we have to correct.'
As stringent sanctions imposed by the European Union and US are crippling business and trade, desperate Russian oil companies are offering huge discounts to India, provided a payment mechanism to bypass the SWIFT ban is quickly approved by the government. According to sources familiar with the development, Russian oil firms are offering 25-27 per cent discount to the dated Brent crude prices. State-run Rosneft is one the biggest oil companies that supply crude to India.
An analysis of seats across the five states shows that the race was won on tighter margins than five years ago, except for Punjab and Uttarakhand.
49.4 per cent of India's arms imports between 2016 and 2020 were from Russia.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has announced a dollar-rupee two-year sell-buy swap auction for $5 billion on March 8, which will suck out rupee liquidity from the system. The swap will be in the nature of a simple sell/buy foreign exchange from the RBI side, in which a bank will buy US dollars from the central bank and simultaneously agree to sell the same amount of US dollars at the end of the swap period. "With a view to elongating the maturity profile of its forward book and smoothen the receivables relating to forward assets, it has been decided to undertake sell/buy swap auction of $5 billion on March 8, 2022," the RBI said in a statement. The auction cut-off will be based on the premium amount in paisa terms up to two decimal points.
Commercial banks in the country continued with their improving asset quality trend in the October-December 2021 quarter with slippages remaining under control coupled with healthy recoveries and upgradation of asset classification. The 28-listed banks reported improvement in bottom line with net profits rising 64.1 per cent year-on-year (YoY) and 21.5 per cent sequentially. This is mostly on account of a fall in provisions and contingencies.
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