India Financial News

Write to Chun Han Wong at [email protected] updated with the latest Trending, India , World and US news.

Russian oil imports have received a free pass for a month, markets are spooked. And reasonably so.Higher crude means higher landed inflation, a wider current account deficit, and pressure on the rupee – all headwinds for corporate earnings, which had only just started staging a recovery. And markets have reacted accordingly – Nifty 50 index dropped almost 3% last week, matching the declines seen in the midcap and smallcap spaces.However, markets are never one-dimensional.

Hotel chains are increasingly rolling out AI tools across various operations as rising costs and tighter margins push them to find efficiencies in existing systems. Global operators in India are scaling similar capabilities.

Mint.For the early growth-stage corporate venture fund, there is a distinction between what venture capital like to call Bharat and rural India. While the term is all-encompassing, it doesn’t account for the fundamental issues facing rural India.

Write to Jared Malsin at [email protected] updated with the latest Trending, India , World and US news.

Coming to the next milestone, more than half of Indian states now have a female-investor share that exceeds the national average of nearly 25%. Despite this, the underlying momentum is undeniably positive as the needle is moving in the right direction nearly everywhere.

Owning property is a big step toward financial independence for women. It provides status in society and an economic foundation.“It is security for life, and it's their right,” said Gautam Khurana, managing partner & founder, India Law Offices LLP in Delhi.However, land ownership by women in India remains abysmal. Only 18.7% of women between the ages 15 and 49 own a house by themselves, while 13.7% own it jointly with someone else, according to World Bank data.Historically, daughters are often excluded from property distribution after a father’s death.

ready-to-eat, or RTE, market. Yet, despite this gap, the RTE and the adjacent ready-to-heat segment already has an addressable consumer base of 70-80 million Indians, reflecting the latent scale of the opportunity.For years, the industry assumed that faster delivery would automatically drive adoption. The rise of quick commerce was treated as a breakthrough, as though reducing delivery time to ten minutes would dissolve consumer hesitation.But, speed was never the real barrier.

This week the focus is on the widening war in West Asia, which matters to us as there are 9-10 million Indian expatriates in the region.It’s now day 7 of Operation Epic Fury, launched jointly by the US and Israel on 28 February. It’s what we were all warned about for years, perhaps even decades – a conflagration in West Asia. As it stood, Iran was at its weakest in decades and Israel perhaps saw it as too good an opportunity to pass up.

₹5,065 crore, up 60% year-on-year, according to an earnings statement from Reliance Industries.India’s FMCG sector remains dominated by established players such as Hindustan Unilever Ltd, which reported revenue of about ₹64,138 crore in FY25—highlighting the scale of the opportunity Reliance is targeting as it builds its consumer business.“What Reliance is doing is cobbling together a portfolio of brands that already have some momentum,” said Arvind Singhal, chairman of The Knowledge Company, a Gurgaon-based management consulting firm.Mint explains the strategy behind Reliance’s push to acquire regional brands and how it differs from rivals.Over the past few years, Reliance Consumer Products Ltd (RCPL) has assembled a portfolio of regional brands across food, beverages and personal care.One of its latest additions is Chennai-based Southern Health Foods Pvt. Ltd, which sells millet-based foods, health mixes and baby nutrition products under the Manna brand.

chat assistants themselves what their favourite words were. Gemini used to favour ‘Delve’, but this has faded as AI feeds on new content and training. Similarly, ‘Tapestry’, ‘Leverage’, and the em dash.

Lala Shri Ram: The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, by Sonu Bhasin notes, it took a contractor’s unsolicited letters of praise before he was grudgingly admitted, without a role or a rupee in pay.In the startup lexicon of 2026, that man, Shri Ram, would be written off as a failure who had taken refuge in a salaried job. The judgment would have been one of the great misreadings of the century.

KPIT Technologies. The three companies ended last year with $1.26 billion, $870 million, and $691 million, up 8.16%, 0.81%, and 17.72%, respectively.

From stranded shipping vessels near Strait of Hormuz amid the West Asia conflict, to the change in sectoral share due to revision in GDP base year, manufacturing and services activity moving in different directions in February, collections in goods and services tax (GST) signalling a post-cut recovery, and the government’s renewed push to faster adoption of electric vehicles, here’s a compilation of this week’s news in numbers.The US-Israel-Iran conflict is threatening to put the global order in chaos, particularly for the flow of gas and oil. At its core is the Strait of Hormuz—a narrow chokepoint through which over a quarter of global oil trade passes—where Iran holds strategic control.According to Kpler's analysis of 223 container vessels between 28 February and 4 March, at least 37 were unable to exit the Gulf, meaning they cannot resume rotations until transit reopens.

Fertilizer is the largest commodity, the global price of which has a direct bearing on subsidy bills. In the case of petroleum, central subsidy is limited to cooking gas and kerosene, and often, state-owned auto-fuel retailers absorb the volatility in global prices by spreading out retail fuel price adjustments.On Friday, the government assured adequate fertilizer availability for the upcoming kharif season starting June.

New Delhi: Industry stakeholders and policy experts have reacted with scepticism over Karnataka’s proposal to ban social media use for youngsters under 16 years of age, questioning both the legality and the practicality of enforcing such a restriction in one state of India.Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah unveiled the proposal along with the state’s budget for FY27 on Friday, but did not share details.Lawyers and policymakers Mint spoke with said such a state-level demographic-specific ban could require intrusive age-verification systems and may be impractical, since many children access social media through adults’ devices and accounts.Further, such a ban may also clash with the Centre’s data-privacy framework, and go against the principles of minimal data sharing put forth in the Digital Personal Data Privacy (DPDP) Act that was notified last year.“Governments considering bans should be careful not to push teens toward less safe, unregulated sites, or logged-out experiences that bypass important protections—like the default safeguards we offer in Instagram’s ‘teen accounts’,” a spokesperson for Meta Platforms Inc said in response to Mint’s queries.“We’ll comply with social media bans where they are enforced, but with teens using nearly 40 apps every week, targeting a handful of companies won’t keep them safe.

Mumbai: The Indian stock markets slumped to their weakest weekly performance in 14 months, after conflict erupted in the Middle East between the US, Israel and Iran on 28 February.Benchmark indices NSE Nifty 50 and BSE Sensex dropped nearly 3% through the week, marking their steepest decline since the week ended 22 December 2024, when markets had corrected over 4% amid concerns over the US Federal Reserve’s hawkish stance and rising bond yields.On Friday, the Nifty 50 fell 1.27% to close at 24,450.45, while the Sensex declined 1.37% to end at 78,918.88, extending their decline following the prior session’s relief rally.Rising crude oil prices and continued selling by foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) weighed on sentiment. Currency weakness added further pressure, with the rupee hitting a record low of 92.1488 against the US dollar on 4 March (Wednesday).Market volatility also spiked during the week, with the India VIX (Volatility Index)—a measure of the market’s expectation of volatility in the Indian stock market over the next 30 days—rising from 13.70 to 19.88, signalling heightened investor nervousness and expectations of larger market swings ahead.To be sure, Indian equities’ fall was milder than several Asian markets.

New Delhi: Facing supply disruption from West Asia, the Indian government has directed all state-run and private-sector refineries in the country to step up production of domestic cooking gas by diverting feedstock away from the manufacturing of non-essential products, including petrochemicals.Using its powers under the Essential Commodities Act, 1955, the ministry has directed all refiners to supply LPG to the three state-owned refiners – Indian Oil Corp Ltd, Bharat Petroleum Corp Ltd, Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd – which will in turn supply it only to domestic consumers of cooking gas.The development is significant as India has only about 25 days of LPG stock. Annual demand stands at 33.15 million tonnes, with imports servicing about 75-80% of this.

The central bank is proposing a safety net for one of the world's largest digital payment ecosystems, offering to partially reimburse victims of cyber fraud—even when the victims themselves are at fault.The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Friday proposed that it, along with banks, will compensate victims of fraudulent digital banking transactions of up to ₹50,000. The customer will be paid up to 85% of the loss, or up to ₹25,000, whichever is lower.

₹1.19 trillion)market, which is still less than 5% organised,” he said.He also added that Uber’s existing intercity cabs business is growing about 50% year-on-year and operating across around 3,000 routes.Only 19% of India’s intercity bus market was booked online in fiscal 2023, underscoring how under-penetrated the category still is despite the scale of demand, according to a 2023 study by travel advisory firm VIDEC Consultants.The same report estimated the overall intercity bus market at ₹539 billion ($6.7 billion) in fiscal 2023 and projected it to grow to ₹688 billion ($8.6 billion) by fiscal 2026.Within the online segment, the report said MakeMyTrip Group-owned redBus controlled about 75% of the OTA intercity bus market in fiscal 2023, with ixigo-owned AbhiBus trailing behind.When asked why Uber was not using its own capital to build a standalone bus-ticketing business, Singh said the category was still under-penetrated enough for multiple models to coexist.“The best part of the fact that, as you laid out, it’s still under-penetrated means there is such a long journey, and we believe different business models will coexist,” he added.Uber wants to retain and acquire users who prefer buses as an affordable intercity option to Uber's premium cab option.

Bengaluru: Varun Dubey, who has spent the past decade moving between India’s consumer internet and healthcare worlds, now wants to build what he calls an “honest healthcare” hospital system—starting with a membership pass that covers consultations and doctor-prescribed diagnostics for a family.“The customer has three fundamental problems when it comes to core healthcare experience today…i.e. high quality care, seamless and easy to access as possible and of course, affordable,” Dubey said in an interview.Dubey’s argument is that India’s hospital experience today is broken due to crowded outpatient departments (OPDs), long waits, opaque billing and low trust arising from one underlying issue: the cost of setting up and running a hospital.That mismatch between what patients want and how hospitals are run, Dubey says, is why he is building SuperHealth.Launched in October, SuperHealth is positioning itself not as an OPD app but as a full hospital, trying to win patients on experience and trust—less wait times, clearer pricing, and fewer incentives for doctors to overprescribe.