India Financial News

Mint India Investment Summit, Puri received the Lifetime Achievement Award and engaged in a candid fireside chat with editor-in-chief Ravi Krishnan. From why he moved to India in 1994 to artificial intelligence in banking and the work culture he batted for, this chat covered a wide range of subjects. Edited excerpts:I think India is still a very under-penetrated market as far as finance is concerned.

For foreign investors backing Indian equities, the financial year 2026 was one they would rather forget. It was a period dotted with global disruptions, starting with US-led tariff uncertainties and ending amid the US-Israel-Iran war.

India’s retail brokers are bracing for a sharp erosion in active clients and revenue as the escalating West Asia war threatens to further dampen market sentiment and trading activity.The active retail client base of brokerages has already shrunk over the past year due to muted, rangebound markets and the impact of regulatory curbs on derivatives trading. The outflow of active clients is set to intensify from March as the US-Iran war increases the risk of more retail investors stepping away from the stock market.“Broker revenues are down 20-30% across the industry year on year.

New Delhi: India’s electronics manufacturing services (EMS) firms are in wait-and-watch mode as the West Asia war disrupts the tech component supply chain and pushes commodity prices upward. While Dixon Technologies and Syrma SGS aren’t factoring pricing and supply chain disruptions into account right away, top executives believe the next few quarters will be key for users, brands and shareholders alike.In an interview with Mint, Sunil Vachani, cofounder and executive chairman of Dixon, said that industry bodies are currently evaluating “at a broad industry level how long it will take for capacities of commodities and components, which are destroyed in the war, to come back up.”“The gas supply chain disruption wouldn’t be affecting us, but it will likely hit air conditioner manufacturers directly,” Vachani said.

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software companies, which often billed clients by the number of hours an engineer spent on a task, are now forced to redefine what is worth a developer’s time.This shift is being felt by young Indians across the workforce, from final-year students appearing for placements to entry-level software engineers and mid-level engineers at information technology (IT) companies.Ansh Masand, a final-year MBA tech engineering student at Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, is witnessing this shift firsthand.Masand, who also works at a Bangalore-based AI startup, says he began freelancing in his second year despite not having the skills to build full-fledged software applications at the time.“I didn’t really know how to make production-ready software,” he says. “But I could ask questions, use AI and deliver something that worked.”Masand says what stood out to his clients was not how the code was written, but how quickly it was delivered.“I was building things in a day and solving problems that existed in their current workflow” he says.

Mumbai: The cement industry is bracing for a sharp price increase in April as the fallout from the war in West Asia drives up production costs. UltraTech Cement Ltd, India’s largest producer, is set to be the first to increase its price, according to an executive in the know.A price hike by the market leader is likely to trigger similar moves by other cement makers, who are under even greater pressure from higher costs, given their relatively smaller scale.“Nobody will increase cement prices now as they need to meet the year-end targets, but price increase will be seen in the month of April, and cost will be passed on to the consumers,” said the executive quoted above, requesting anonymity, discussing business strategy.Emails sent to UltraTech did not elicit a response till press time.The rise in cement prices is expected to marginally increase construction and infrastructure costs, as cement typically accounts for around 5% of total construction cost, according to Satyadeep Jain, lead analyst for cement, metals, mining and utilities at Ambit Capital.“Cement companies will need ₹20/bag price hike to fully offset cost Inflation vs typical ₹7-8/bag hike in April.

9th Mint India Investment Summit in Mumbai last week. Panellists, including senior in-house legal counsels and law firm partners, said weak enforcement sits at the heart of the problem, raising the cost of doing business and deterring investment.The inability to enforce contracts swiftly and predictably, along with delays, frequent adjournments, procedural hurdles and lack of subject-matter expertise, creates friction for companies and investors.

India’s technology market has often served as a proving ground where global platforms compete both for users and influence over the digital set-ups of industries. The rise of GenAI models is setting the stage for a similar contest. Winning revenue from Indian enterprises will soon become one of their most consequential battlegrounds.

Despite Brent crude at $115 a barrel, shares of oil marketing companies (OMCs) Indian Oil Corp Ltd (IOCL), Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd (HPCL), and Bharat Petroleum Corp Ltd (BPCL) held up better than the broader market during Monday’s selloff. Markets see the government’s ₹10-per-litre excise duty cut from Friday as exactly what the doctor ordered for a sector staring at steep under-recoveries: ₹26 per litre and ₹82 per litre for petrol and diesel, respectively.The policy move could cost the exchequer nearly ₹14,000 crore in revenue per month.

trade deficit and high gold imports.The impact of the war-led disruptions—built on top of the calibrated depreciation—pushed the rupee towards a level not previously anticipated. Even then, economists believe that the RBI should not defend the rupee too much as it may provide temporary relief, but could stoke sharper depreciation later."If this is a long-drawn-out crisis, you want to preserve your forex reserves because when we got into trouble in 2013, our reserves went down, then the taper tantrum made it worse," said Gaura Sengupta, chief economist at IDFCFirst Bank.Forex reserves declined 3.4% and 0.6% in FY12 and FY13, but failed to arrest the rupee’s decline.

Mint, he said such corrections often create compelling entry points for long-term investors.Markets tend to react sharply to geopolitical events, especially in the early stages. However, over time, volatility usually stabilizes as markets adjust. What makes the current situation more complex for India is its dependence on energy imports.

Mumbai: India is expected to sustain strong M&A momentum, including cross-border deals, as investors take a long-term view despite macro headwinds, top executives said at the Mint India Investment Summit.“It’s interesting how the last three quarters over 2025 have shown the ability of investors to digest any volatility, price it in if required and proceed with M&As as they see sense in it over a 5–10-year horizon,” Devarajan Nambakam, co-head of India investment banking for Goldman Sachs Group, said at the summit last week.“This is probably going to be tested more this year than last, but the ability of investors to see through these volatilities has been the biggest mindset shift.”With India being a robust growth economy, there is demand for capital to accelerate this pace and for shareholders looking to monetize their stake among others, he added.“From a supply perspective, it’s safe to say that almost no pool of capital is unavailable in India be it strategic capital, private equity, private credit or hybrid capital. Today, the quantum of the capital that is available is higher than we’ve seen.

Dubai-based company runs the world’s largest hotel loyalty programme for independent hotels, bringing together over 50 brands and 950 hotels across 100 countries. Hartley said that while the war may weigh on short-term bookings, India’s outbound market remains largely untapped.Travel to West Asia is still disrupted and could shift flows in the near term, he said, but the broader trajectory of demand is unlikely to change. “The question now is really if it can be resolved in April.

When taxpayers complain that the income tax department is adversarial, the issue is often framed as interpersonal and behavioural. Are officers too aggressive? Are notices too intrusive? Is the department predisposed to distrust the taxpayer? These questions matter, but they misstate the problem. The real difficulty is institutional.

New Delhi: India has intensified its public health battle against tuberculosis (TB), a disease that the World Health Organization said officially reclaimed its position as the world’s leading infectious killer in 2023, surpassing covid-19. While the initial 2025 target set in the National Strategic Plan served as a catalyst for a 10-fold increase in funding to ₹6,356 crore in FY26 from ₹640 crore in 2015, India remains committed to eliminating the disease well ahead of the global 2030 deadline.To reach this goal, the government is leveraging artificial intelligence, community support, and rigorous airborne infection control.

Amid the US-Israel war with Iran, concerns are growing about the safety of subsea cables in West Asia—the hidden network that carries most of the world’s internet. A large part of India’s data travels through these cables, many of which pass through regions now at risk of conflict.

₹5,191.06 crore redemption, small-cap funds saw inflows of ₹3,881.06 crore in February, prompting fund houses to launch new schemes and reopen existing ones.The opportunity is real, but so are the risks. Experts warn that low liquidity, stretched valuations, and governance weaknesses can turn potential gains into sharp losses.“The runway is huge and positive, but the interim perils are also real,” remarked Harsh Gupta Madhusudan, fund manager-PIPE, Ionic Asset.Following this renewed interest, ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund reopened subscriptions to its Small Cap Fund in January, Groww Mutual Fund launched a new small-cap scheme around the same time.

The taxation of share buybacks in India has come full circle, reflecting the government's continuing effort to balance revenue considerations with anti-avoidance safeguards. Before 2013 buybacks were treated akin to a sale of shares, with shareholders taxed on the resulting capital gains.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) recently issued draft amendments to its Responsible Business Conduct Regulations. These cover the advertising, marketing and sales of financial products and services by banks, non-bank financial companies and other all-India financial institutions either by their own staff or by direct sales or marketing agents. The most consequential element in RBI’s proposals is that for the first time they define ‘mis-selling’ to include any sale of a product or service that is neither suitable nor appropriate for a customer profile even with customer consent.

In global climate politics, clarity is often elusive. Grand declarations outpace delivery and ambition is often divorced from reality. Against this backdrop, India’s newly-approved Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for 2031–2035 stand out as a picture of coherence.