Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea have communicated to the telecom department that they will not pay AGR dues of Rs 88,624 crore, the deadline for which ended on Thursday, and will wait for the outcome of modification petition listed for hearing before the Supreme Court next week, according to official sources. Reliance Jio on Thursday paid Rs 195 crore to the telecom department to clear all adjusted gross revenue dues accounted till January 31, 2020, according to an official source.
Data processing compliance is the main reason behind the delay. The government, on several occasions, has made it clear that Indian financial data needs to be stored exclusively onshore and if it is processed outside, it needs to be brought back in 24 hours.
In January, Visa's chief executive officer, Al Kelly, said during an earnings call that "there's been a burst of the balloon in valuations in the fintech world". Noting that the trend of lower valuations "is a helpful characteristic of the current environment", he added: "We will look for capabilities and management teams that will bring more value to Visa than we can bring ourselves." Data from KPMG's Pulse of Fintech H2'22 shows that global fintech investment - via mergers and acquisitions (M&As), private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) firms - at $164.1 billion in 2022, was down 31 per cent over the year before. Indian fintechs held up better during this timeframe, attracting $6 billion, or a fall of 24 per cent.
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is the world's main banking messaging service which links around 11,000 banks and institutions in more than 200 countries, including India.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday inaugurated the 6th India Mobile Congress at Pragati Maidan in Delhi and launched 5G services. The 5G telecom services seek to provide seamless coverage, high data rate, low latency and highly reliable communications system. The three major telecom operators of the country demonstrated one use case each in front of the prime minister to show the potential of 5G technology in India.
Ajit Balakrishnan offers a thinking man's guide to the state of ecom in a nation of shopkeepers.
Auditors seem to have developed a heightened sense of risk and are not content to tick the boxes and sign the papers.
With the arrival of new players such as Amazon Pay, Google Tez and Flipkart's PhonePe, digital money companies are now changing their business pitch.
'We revolutionised the system in a manner so that the chances of leakage will be much lower than it was in the beginning.'
The Chhattisgarh government has decided to set up model fair-price shops (FPS) in each district and encourage owners to act as banking correspondents for providing financial services. The state has around 12,300 fair-price shops across 33 districts. The state government is, however, encouraging FPS owners to provide a host of services besides acting as a banking correspondent.
The 16-digit randomly generated number by the Aadhaar system was supposed to be introduced by the UIDAI on March 1 and mandatorily deployed by companies using Aadhaar by June 1.
The suspected security breach happened through a malware in the systems of Hitachi Payments Services, which serves ATM network of Yes Bank
With this, India joins 60 other countries that collect PNR details of international passengers.
'The Indian economy and the Indian financial sector today remain resilient and much better placed.'
Seeking to rope in youngsters to promote cashless transactions, Modi said for every person you introduce to the BHIM app, you will get a cash back of Rs 10.
Aadhaar is falling behind on technology, missing out on confidentiality and has gaps in its data archiving policy and preserving confidentiality in delivery of the cards to people, says a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG). The performance report, 'Functioning Of Unique Identification Authority Of India', tabled in Parliament on the last day of the budget session notes, assigning a unique identity to all resident Indians was supposed to be the key feature of Aadhaar. But "There were instances of issue of Aadhaar with the same biometric data to different residents indicating flaws in the de-duplication process and issue of Aadhaar on faulty biometrics and documents". It says close to half a million such records had to be cancelled by the Unique Identification Authority of India up to 2016.
There has been a 45 per cent growth in 'active internet users' in rural India since 2019, according a study by Nielsen, a global company for audience measurement, data and analytics. The Bharat 2.0 Internet report said that female active internet users grew by 61 per cent since 2019. The report said that India has 646 million active Internet users aged 2 years and above as of December 2021. Rural India has 352 million internet users--almost 20 per cent higher than urban.
'Demand is wonderful. We have crossed 10 million on many days.' 'The Swedish trade commissioner recently said, "You guys are vaccinating the entire Sweden in one day".'
Report holds Hitachi responsible for debit card data theft. When the data theft came to light, Hitachi had denied that its systems were compromised.
The key components of the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission include a health ID for every citizen that will also work as their health account, to which personal health records can be linked and viewed with the help of a mobile application, a Healthcare Professionals Registry (HPR) and Healthcare Facilities Registries (HFR) that will act as a repository of all healthcare providers across both modern and traditional systems of medicine.
The Bharat Interface For Money app was launched on the iOS platform earlier this month. It is also available on the more popular Android platform. There have been over 17 million downloads of the BHIM app so far.
The temptation to get into businesses that are hot is perhaps too great for any politician, no matter what his public slogans are. Nehru plunged into hot sectors of his time -- engineering and iron and steel. Modi has plunged into digital payments -- the hot sector of his time, notes Debashis Basu.
Apart from mobile apps, 611 websites with the .in domain in the country were also found to be vulnerable, the Trend Micro survey reveals.
The CBI has arrested seven persons including two directors of a Noida-based private institution in connection with alleged manipulation of JEE Mains examination 2021, officials said Friday.
Indian start-ups raised issues, such as blockages in international wire transfers, disruptions due to threshold limits on withdrawals, lack of communication from US agencies, and the need for preferential access to credit, in a meeting with the government over the fallout of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, minister of state for electronics and information technology, held a virtual meeting with over 450 members from start-ups, venture capitalists, and investors who have been directly affected by the closure of SVB. He assured them that the IT ministry would put together a list of suggestions and give it to the finance minister on behalf of start-ups.
Demonetisation of the high value currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 did not have any discernible impact on currency in circulation (CIC) in the country, which has soared by almost 83 per cent since its announcement on November 8, 2016. The Supreme Court on Monday upheld the decision of the government on demonetisation. On November 8, 2016 Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced demonetisation of old Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 banknotes and one of the key objectives of the unprecedented decision was to promote digital payments and curb black money flows.
'There has been a marked increase in four types of cases.' 'One is fraud related to online deliveries, online shopping and online groceries and liquor.' 'Second fake news, third hate speech and fourth sextortion.'
The government plans to implement the single rate GST, which would subsume central excise, service tax and other local levies, from April 1, 2016
Economic activity has regained momentum from late-May after the dent caused by the second wave of COVID-19, and the pandemic's impact on the overall asset quality has been less than expected, Reserve Bank Governor Shaktikanta Das said on Thursday. However, Das flagged rising data breaches and cyber-attacks as among the risks for the recovering economy, along with others like firming global commodity prices. The governor also said the second wave had a "grievous toll" on the country.
Mihir Tanna, Associate Director, S K Patodia & Associates, answers your tax queries.
Several Indian banks have alerted their customers not to download apps from any source other than official app stores. Banking customers are being targeted by a new type of mobile banking malware campaign using SOVA Android Trojan. This malware captures the credentials when users log onto their net-banking apps and access bank accounts. The new version of SOVA appears to be targeting more than 200 mobile applications, including banking apps and crypto wallets.
Whether it's about colonising Mars or donning Net-connected apparel, 2022 is a year everyone seems to be planning for, says Nivedita Mookerji.
'The finance minister said, the MSME is the backbone of the economy. My question is, what have you done for the sector?'
Professionals with sharp technical skills and knowledge of emerging markets will continue to be in demand, says Nikhil Barshikar, founder and CEO of Imarticus Learning, a tech learning and training company.
The last few years have been uncharacteristically good for the Indian sugar sector for a variety of reasons. While on the one hand, the weather supported good crop production; on the other hand, the programme to blend ethanol with petrol took off in a big way. The long-pending problem of burgeoning sugarcane arrears almost came down to nil and exports boomed to record highs.
'There are unscrupulous traders who create fake invoices by showing bogus e-way bills, movement of goods.' 'Since the entities registered across different states, and kept on changing their numbers, tracing them was difficult.'
Absence of comprehensive data protection and privacy laws will be barriers in the government's digitalisation drive.
Whether one likes it or not, services constitute the value-addition sector that the country has to build on, using its comparative advantage in infotech and related skills, suggests T N Ninan.
The potted history of the browser wars indicates how much the online space has altered in the last 25 years. Chrome's dominance, says Devangshu Datta, is unlikely to last forever.
Traders who pay in rupees generate over Rs 50 crore in daily cryptocurrency volumes. Indians actually invest a great deal more in forex-denominated trades, observes Devangshu Dutta, explaining why it is impossible to ban cryptocurrency.