Category: India LIVE

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

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has laid the foundation stone for Bajaj Finserv’s planned technology-led corporate campus in Pune, a 7.2-million-square-foot development the company says will become the country’s largest single-location financial services office.

The campus at Koregaon Park Annexe is being designed around artificial intelligence and Internet of Things systems that will monitor environmental conditions, occupancy and infrastructure and adjust building operations in real time. Bajaj Finserv describes the project as its first “sentient” corporate campus.

Fadnavis unveiled a commemorative plaque

Kenya’s President William Ruto has ordered Tata Chemicals to end its operations in the country and said two new companies would be brought in to replace it, escalating a dispute over the future of soda ash mining at Lake Magadi.

Ruto announced the decision during a visit to Kajiado County on Thursday, arguing that Tata Chemicals’ long presence in the area had delivered insufficient industrial development for local communities. He said any replacement investors would be expected to establish manufacturing operations

HDFC Bank is close to losing its position as the heaviest stock in the Nifty 50 to ICICI Bank after a sharp share-price decline narrowed the difference between the two lenders to less than half a percentage point.

HDFC Bank’s weighting in the benchmark has fallen to about 9.81 per cent, compared with 9.34 per cent for ICICI Bank, leaving a gap that exceeded four percentage points at the start of 2026. Reliance Industries remains third, with a weighting slightly

India’s hotel industry is expected to strengthen in the second half of FY27 as robust domestic leisure travel, improving corporate demand, weddings and a seasonal recovery in international arrivals support occupancy and room rates.

A sector assessment by PhillipCapital said the April-June quarter had already shown resilience despite geopolitical disruptions, with industry occupancy rising by two to four percentage points from a year earlier. Average room rates increased 6-8 per cent, while revenue per available room, or RevPAR, advanced 11-13 per

OpenAI has appointed Meta’s India and Southeast Asia vice-president Sandhya Devanathan as its vice-president for Southeast Asia and Australia, strengthening the ChatGPT maker’s regional leadership as it expands consumer, enterprise and government engagement across Asia-Pacific.

Devanathan is due to take up the newly created role in October and will be based in Singapore, reporting to Kiran Mani, OpenAI’s managing director for Asia-Pacific. Her responsibilities will cover consumer growth, enterprise adoption and partnerships, regulatory engagement and operations across Southeast Asia and Australia.

The

India and Kuwait have agreed to deepen defence cooperation across military training, exercises, medicine, staff-level exchanges, defence production and research, giving operational shape to the strategic partnership established between the two countries in 2024.

The agreement emerged from the inaugural meeting of the India-Kuwait Joint Defence Committee in New Delhi on August 28, marking the first formal session of the mechanism created to institutionalise expanding security and military ties.

The talks were co-chaired by Joint Secretary Amitabh Prasad and Brigadier General Raed

India’s foreign-exchange reserves climbed to an all-time high of $729.33 billion as strong dollar inflows boosted the country’s external buffer and gave the Reserve Bank of India greater room to manage currency volatility.

The reserves increased by $12.42 billion in the week ended August 21, extending their rise for an eighth consecutive week. The latest accumulation pushed the stockpile above the previous record of about $728.5 billion reached in February and marked an increase of roughly $63 billion over eight weeks.

India’s data centre real estate footprint is projected to exceed 101 million square feet by 2030, nearly four times the 27 million square feet recorded in the first half of 2026, as artificial intelligence, cloud computing and hyperscale investments accelerate demand for digital infrastructure.

The expansion is being backed by more than $300 billion in announced investment commitments across data centres and associated digital infrastructure, putting the sector among the country’s fastest-growing infrastructure segments. The development pipeline could lift installed

Flipkart has emerged as a serious challenger to India’s established quick-commerce platforms two years after launching Minutes, with daily orders surging past one million and its fulfilment network expanding rapidly across large and smaller cities.

The Walmart-owned company’s rapid-delivery service is handling an estimated 1.1 million to 1.2 million orders a day, compared with roughly 390,000 to 400,000 in November. That has brought Flipkart Minutes within striking distance of Swiggy Instamart, which is processing about 1.4 million daily orders.

Blinkit remains