Category: India LIVE

Air India Express has been directed to pay ₹27,000 to a passenger after a consumer commission found that his racing bicycle was placed on a regular baggage conveyor despite a separate fee for special equipment handling.

The District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission in Dakshina Kannada held that the airline had failed to provide the level of care it had undertaken to offer after collecting ₹2,000 from passenger Sushanth N. G. for special handling. The order, passed on August 31, directed the

Microsoft has formally launched its India South Central cloud region in Hyderabad, expanding its domestic cloud footprint to four regions and positioning the new facility for large-scale artificial intelligence and mission-critical workloads.

The Hyderabad region operates across three availability zones and is designed to provide resilience for organisations running critical applications. Microsoft said the architecture is aligned with applicable regulatory and seismic requirements in India, while giving customers additional options for data residency, continuity and governance.

The company said the region is

Kerala Tourism has stepped up its outreach to Gulf travellers at Arabian Travel Market 2026 in Dubai, using the four-day trade fair to present the state’s backwaters, wellness products, culture, nature and adventure experiences to buyers and industry partners.

Tourism Minister P. C. Vishnunadh visited the Kerala pavilion at the Dubai World Trade Centre and met UAE Minister of Economy and Tourism Abdulla bin Touq Al Marri as the state sought to deepen engagement with one of its most important overseas

A member of the National Traders’ Welfare Board has urged the Centre to withdraw the new merchant discount rate on higher-value UPI payments, warning that the levy could impede business growth and increase costs for consumers.

Ramesh Khandelwal, who represents Madhya Pradesh on the government-constituted board, said on Wednesday that the 0.4 per cent merchant discount rate, or MDR, on UPI transactions above Rs 2,000 was at odds with the government’s stated emphasis on ease of doing business. The charge is

Petrol pump dealers have asked the Centre to exempt fuel outlets entirely from merchant discount rate charges on UPI payments, arguing that even the concessional ₹5 levy planned for transactions above ₹2,000 would directly erode fixed dealer margins.

The All India Petroleum Dealers Association, led by president Ajay Bansal, made the request in a letter to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday, seeking relief before the revised UPI merchant payment framework takes effect on October 15.

Under the new framework,

India summoned Pakistan’s top diplomat in New Delhi on Wednesday after naval vessels from the two countries collided in international waters of the northern Arabian Sea, escalating friction more than a year after their last military confrontation.

The Ministry of External Affairs said Pakistan’s Charge d’Affaires was called in and a strong protest lodged over what it described as “unacceptable and unprofessional conduct” by Pakistani naval units. The ministry said the conduct led to a collision with a unit of

India’s Securities and Exchange Board has given arbitrage mutual funds greater flexibility to manage hedged equity positions around the new closing auction, a step aimed at increasing institutional liquidity in the end-of-day price-setting mechanism.

The regulatory relaxation allows fund managers more room to adjust the cash and futures legs of arbitrage trades while participating in the Closing Auction Session, people familiar with the change said. The move is intended to encourage funds that collectively manage a large pool of equity-linked assets

PhonePe is widening the use of artificial intelligence across customer service, fraud control, merchant tools, software engineering and corporate functions, with automation now resolving about 94 per cent of customer support cases.

Rahul Chari, PhonePe’s founder and chief product and technology officer, said the company is concentrating on AI deployments that produce measurable gains in operating, product or revenue metrics rather than adding the technology indiscriminately across its platform.

Chari told the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai that the company’s approach starts

The Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation has opened an official WhatsApp channel to distribute verified updates and service information to members, adding another digital route for communicating changes affecting provident fund and pension users.

EPFO announced the channel through its official account on X, sharing a direct joining link and QR code. The channel had more than 83,000 followers by Tuesday, reflecting early uptake among members seeking alerts on schemes, procedures, service changes and public notices.

The new channel, however, should not be

Egypt and India have agreed to pursue concrete steps towards lifting bilateral trade to $12 billion, with President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and Prime Minister Narendra Modi also discussing ways to expand investment ties during talks on the sidelines of the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi.

The leaders met on Sunday as Egypt pressed for faster progress on a trade goal first set during El-Sisi’s state visit to New Delhi in January 2023. Egypt’s presidency said the discussions covered measures to

Cochin International Airport Limited has deployed a passenger assistance robot at Kochi airport, offering travellers real-time flight information, directions to boarding gates and details about Kerala’s traditional arts.

The robot has begun operating at Kalangan, the art museum inside the Domestic Security Hold Area, marking the first phase of a wider plan to introduce robotic assistance across the airport. CIAL Managing Director S. Suhas inaugurated the service, which is intended to give passengers access to travel information while they move through

PayU has introduced Fraud Liability Protect, an artificial intelligence-powered service aimed at reducing fraud losses and payment failures for merchants in India accepting international cards.

The product, unveiled at Global Fintech Fest 2026, combines machine-learning risk assessment, dynamic authentication and protection against eligible fraud chargebacks. PayU said the system evaluates cross-border card payments using transaction and behavioural signals, then determines how much authentication each payment requires.

Low-risk transactions can pass with less friction, while payments assessed as higher risk are routed through

Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal has urged BRICS members and partner countries to link payment systems, expand local-currency trade and open markets more widely as India presses for stronger economic integration across the grouping.

Addressing the BRICS Business Forum in New Delhi, Goyal said greater connectivity between national payment networks, including systems modelled on India’s Unified Payments Interface, could lower friction in cross-border commerce while supporting wider use of members’ own currencies.

His proposals were aligned with the economic agenda carried

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed to strengthen economic, transport and people-to-people links while preserving peace along their disputed frontier, using Xi’s first visit to India in seven years to push forward a cautious repair of bilateral relations.

The two leaders met on Saturday on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in New Delhi and welcomed what the Prime Minister’s Office described as steady progress in ties since their meeting in Tianjin in August 2025. They agreed

The Reserve Bank of India has turned down Tata Sons’ request to surrender its core investment company registration, leaving the group holding company subject to rules that require upper-layer non-banking financial companies to list on stock exchanges.

The decision was conveyed in a letter dated September 11 after the central bank considered Tata Sons’ March 28, 2024 application and subsequent correspondence, people familiar with the matter said. The RBI advised the company to take the steps needed to comply fully with

Modi pressed Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian to support freedom of navigation, uninterrupted commerce and the safety of seafarers as the two leaders met in New Delhi on Friday amid continuing conflict and shipping disruption across West Asia.

The talks, held on the sidelines of the BRICS summit, focused on bilateral relations and the regional security situation. India’s Prime Minister reiterated that disputes should be resolved through dialogue and diplomacy and called for sustained efforts to secure lasting peace and stability, according

TechSparks 2026 has expanded its speaker roster for the October summit in Bengaluru, adding technology executives, founders and investors to a three-day programme focused on artificial intelligence, deep technology and digital infrastructure.

The latest additions include Zoho co-founder and chief scientist Sridhar Vembu, Angel One Group chief executive Ambarish Kenghe, Emergent founder and chief executive Mukund Jha and Canva country manager Chandrika Deb. Their participation was announced on September 10, extending a lineup that already includes senior policymakers, fintech founders, researchers,

Flipkart-backed payments platform Super. money is rolling out artificial-intelligence agents designed to shop for products and buy digital gold on users’ behalf, positioning autonomous transactions as a way to challenge larger rivals in India’s payments market.

The move comes as the National Payments Corporation of India develops protocols for identifying and authorising AI agents on the Unified Payments Interface, creating infrastructure that could let software complete selected payments under rules and limits set by customers.

Super. money founder and chief executive Prakash

National Stock Exchange of India has cut the size of its long-awaited initial public offering by more than 15 per cent, with several existing shareholders reducing planned sales after the exchange settled on a lower valuation range.

The offer will now comprise up to 126.44 million shares, down from about 148.91 million in the draft prospectus, according to the red herring prospectus dated September 10. The price band has been fixed at Rs 1,700 to Rs 1,785 a share, valuing NSE

India is preparing to press BRICS partners to deepen the use of central bank digital currencies for cross-border payments while avoiding support for a single bloc-wide payments network that could be portrayed as an alternative to the dollar-dominated financial system.

The proposal is expected to feature at the BRICS leaders’ summit in New Delhi on September 12 and 13, where India, as this year’s chair, is seeking agreement on ways to lower the cost and speed up the settlement of trade,

The rupee weakened 25 paise to 95.33 against the US dollar on Thursday as elevated crude oil prices increased concern over India’s import bill and kept demand for dollars firm.

The currency came under pressure after Brent crude held above $100 a barrel amid continuing tensions in West Asia, reinforcing worries about higher energy costs for a country that imports more than three-quarters of its crude oil requirements. The rupee had settled at 95.1050 against the dollar on Wednesday after touching

Veegaland Developers has secured ₹63 crore from anchor investors ahead of its ₹210 crore initial public offering, giving the Kerala-focused property developer an institutional base before public bidding opened on Thursday.

The company allotted 45 lakh equity shares to anchor investors on September 9 at ₹140 apiece, the top end of the IPO price band. The allocation represented 30 per cent of the total 1.5 crore shares offered in the issue.

Public subscription opened on September 10 and will close on September

KOCHI: Artificial intelligence is accelerating the scale, speed and sophistication of cybercrime, making resilience and skilled manpower critical to protecting essential systems, Director General of Police-rank officer and Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau Director Manoj Abraham warned at the Kerala Cyber Suraksha Summit 2026.

Addressing the second edition of the summit at Le Meridien, Kochi, on Saturday, Abraham said cyberattacks had evolved to a point where they could cripple countries and organisations, disrupt critical infrastructure and interfere with military operations without conventional