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Mint, more than half of SMEs lack access to affordable finance, real-time climate information and insurance products, forcing many to treat resilience spending as discretionary.The findings come as businesses worldwide face rising risks from natural disasters, with climate change intensifying extreme weather and geological events. There are an estimated 358 million SMEs globally.SMEs are often the worst-affected by climate disasters and the least equipped to recover.

quality control orders (QCOs) between mid-November and early December, even as it launched over 15 new standards in the same period. The number of new standards notified has risen to close to 50 after Saturday's update.The standards create a pipeline for future regulation as the standards can be converted into mandatory QCOs in future.Experts say the latest standards are designed to be flexibile.

₹14.5 lakh in the pre-GST phase to nearly ₹19 lakh post the reform. This increase reflected a deliberate reassessment of adequacy rather than incremental upgrades.For years, health covers priced below ₹10 lakh have dominated new purchases, largely due to price sensitivity and a limited understanding of hospital costs.

India Ageing Report 2023 projects that the number of persons aged 60 years and above would double from 149 million in 2023 to over 347 million (25% of the population) by 2050. The dependency ratio would grow from 16% in 2020 to 34% by 2050.This has profound social, political and economic implications.

₹15,000-crore fruit economy, trapping apple growers in a cycle of rising input costs and recurring losses, even as the promise of crop insurance remains largely theoretical.Weighed down by low enthusiasm after another season of heavy losses, fruit growers have begun the new farming cycle, pruning apple trees in their orchards, amid Chilai Kalan, Kashmir's harshest forty days of winter.In Allaiepora village of Pulwama, Khursheed Ahmad Allaie tells Mint that the apple growers who once invested heavily in establishing high-density orchards, converting paddy fields into apple farms, now find themselves at a loss, as the impacts of the climate crisis have intensified over the past decade.“Global warming has changed everything. Heatwaves bring disease.

When the new tax regime was first introduced in the Union Budget 2020-21, it did not attract many takers that fiscal year.This new optional tax regime offered taxpayers lower tax rates in exchange for foregoing most tax deductions and exemptions under the then-prevailing old tax regime. Its newness and the fact that the old regime still remained more attractive for most people made the shift infeasible.However, the government brought in changes to make the new regime more attractive, encouraging more people to adopt it.

Mint has seen copies of both filings.Privately held Natsoft filed its lawsuit against Hexaware in an Illinois district court on 23 September, alleging that Hexaware used application modernization software whose functioning was covered by nine patents developed by Updraft, an IT services company Natsoft acquired in 2024. The company claimed Hexaware marketed these products for both application modernization and GenAI use cases.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Mutual funds are pushing back against the Indian market regulator’s proposal to introduce a fee linked to good performance, citing the difficulty of calculating these amounts.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Close to 4.6 million weddings are expected to be hosted by the end of the calendar year—and the wedding season is still only halfway through. These large-scale celebrations involve dozens of moving parts, from venues and vendors to guests and travel logistics, raising the risk of things going wrong.

It is heartening that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has decided to adopt a risk-based framework for deposit insurance to replace a one-size-fits-all one which does not distinguish between banks on the basis of their individual risk profiles. This decision was taken on Friday and it follows RBI’s monetary policy statement of October 2025, in which the central bank had proposed a model that abandons a flat premium rate in favour of payments that vary by risk—in this case, of a regular bank failing to meet its obligations to depositors. With this shift slated to come into effect from 2026-27, financially sound banks can expect to save on the price they pay.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Indian stock markets are expected to rise on Monday, with foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) turning net buyers in cash over the past couple of days and closing out negative Nifty derivatives bets on Friday, according to exchange data. Market analysts said the optimism stemmed from rising investor hopes of an India-US trade deal and the sharp rebound in the rupee.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. India and Oman trade goods worth roughly $10 billion annually. Still, the CEPA signed last week comes at a pivotal moment for India’s trade policy, as it seeks deeper market access, supply-chain security and services expansion.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Ticker is a weekly newsletter by Vijay L Bhambwani. Subscribe to Mint's newsletters to get them directly in your email inbox. Dear reader, Last week, I wrote that bulls would have to do some significant work to push markets higher.

On Thursday the Union government passed the Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Bill 2025 in the Lok Sabha, proposing a sweeping overhaul of India’s two-decade-old rural job guarantee programme. It has now been sent to the Rajya Sabha for discussion.The new bill seeks to replace the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), 2005 and the scheme named after it, MGNREGS, which has 260 million registered workers and covers 26,9000 gram panchayats across India.According to the government, the bill seeks to transform the nature of the scheme by bringing states in as partners, and resolve a longstanding problem in the rural job market—of MGNREGA jobs competing with regular ones when their wages are close to or higher than what local farmers or small contractors pay.Critics, however, say the bill significantly increases the financial and administrative burden on local governments as it passes on some of the wage costs – currently borne entirely by the Centre – to states.Mint takes a closer look at proposed changes, their implications, and the critisisms against them.In a statement on the new bill, the government said rural India has undergone a transformation over the past two decades.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The RBI’s rate cut has generated strong buying interest at lower price levels, suggesting that the market trend is now turning positive. Although resistance remains at higher prices, the recent market decline has paused for now.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) is likely to rationalise margins on equity derivatives on non-expiry days to encourage big traders to place longer-term bets rather than focus solely on the expiration day, two people aware of the development told Mint. This move could deepen the derivatives markets, where most of the trading by large, high-frequency and proprietary traders as well as individual investors takes place on weekly option contracts' expiry.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Indian companies are rethinking the benefits they offer their staff, such as healthcare, retiral plans, wellbeing perks, and leave, as they seek to control budgets while retaining top talent without compromising on employee experience.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New Delhi: A new evaluation of the Centre’s onion buffer programme has found that the Price Stabilisation Fund (PSF) has been able to significantly reduce retail price volatility of the vegetable and improve farmer incomes.

For pharmaceutical firms, watching lucrative patents on their top-selling drugs expire has long been part of the business cycle. There’s enormous pressure to find ways of covering the shortfall. For the first time, China has something to offer.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Delhi and Mumbai are deep into a polluted winter, and pets are breathing the same toxic air we are. Poor air quality harms pets slowly rather than dramatically, which means the safest approach is to plan the day around the air instead of sticking to routine out of habit.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New Delhi: In a major move, the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) has notified 12 new standards in a single round, covering artificial intelligence, secure financial cryptographic devices, audit data systems, lifts, campus facilities, rotating electrical machines and optical fibre testing, as per two separate government orders.