Inclusion Financial News

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. There are two basic elements to any successful development strategy: growth and redistribution. Over the last decade, the Narendra Modi government has been very successful with policies of redistribution.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is seeking an early boost for shares after the rocket-and-satellite business makes its stock market debut later this year. Advisers for the company, which recently merged with xAI, have reached out to major index providers, including Nasdaq, to discuss how SpaceX and this year’s other hot startups might join key indexes sooner than normal, according to people familiar with the matter.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Maruti Suzuki India Ltd has been directly added to the list of companies eligible for incentives under the government’s ₹25,000 crore production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme for electric vehicles—a move that could boost EV adoption and support India’s clean mobility push. According to officials and experts, the inclusion is significant given Maruti’s roughly 40% share of India’s passenger vehicle market.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It’s not typical of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to abruptly change its schedule of open market operations. So when it did so this week, it raised eyebrows.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. NEW DELHI: India is set to notify revised and stricter national standards for elevators used by people with disabilities, designed to make buildings safer for them, more accessible and easier to navigate independently. The move to enforce stricter technical and functional requirements is seen as a fresh push to the Accessible India campaign launched in 2015 to improve mobility and access for divyangjans across buildings, workplaces, public transport and daily infrastructure, two people aware of the matter said.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The Union Budget is to be placed before Parliament once again, with every sector seeking greater funding. When I took over as secretary of school education, Government of India, in 2016, I was aghast to discover that even the nominal allocation to school education had been consistently declining since 2014.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The coming decade will be unlike anything we have seen before. Multiple technology shifts are maturing in parallel: the intelligence revolution and rise of digital labour; breakthroughs in frontier technologies like biotechnology and advanced materials; compute moving from centralized data centres to the intelligent edge; and quantum applications becoming real in areas such as drug discovery, defence and logistics.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. India’s equity benchmarks may be on the verge of a structural transition, even if the headline index remains frozen.

NEW DELHI: The finance ministry is weighing a plan to provide credit guarantee cover to funds that NBFCs raise from banks and ramp up their microfinance operations, according to two people familiar with the development.The proposed one-time credit guarantee scheme will help non-banking financial company-microfinance institutions (NBFC-MFIs) access funds from banks easily and tide over a liquidity crunch in maintaining their lending to low-income households that lack access to traditional banking.The guarantee cover under consideration will be larger than the ₹7,500 crore cover that was offered during the pandemic. The new scheme is likely to be managed by the state-run National Credit Guarantee Trustee Company, which will cover and underwrite the lending risk to NBFC-MFIs arising due to factors outside the control of small borrowers.This will help NBFC-MFIs to draw funds on easier terms from financial institutions.

India is making steady progress on artificial intelligence (AI). After chairing the Global Partnership on AI Council in 2024, the country is preparing to host the five-day India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi in mid-February. Apart from heads of state, CEOs of tech firms such as Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Adobe, Salesforce and Qualcomm are expected to attend.

Mint.For users, this would mean smartphones would automatically redirect a portion of data traffic from cellular networks to nearby Wi-Fi networks when available—including hotspots under the PM-WANI (Prime Minister Wi-Fi Access Network Interface) scheme—without interrupting calls, SMS, or applications.This will help reduce congestion on crowded mobile networks, improve speed in indoor and high-traffic areas, and enable operators to use their limited mobile spectrum more efficiently, often without users noticing any change.“Telecom operators in India do offload traffic to Wi-Fi in specific scenarios, but the practice has varied widely and lacked a nationally accepted technical framework,” a government official said, on condition of anonymity.“The new draft standard aims to define how Wi-Fi can work seamlessly with mobile networks, including public Wi-Fi, while ensuring there are no call drops during network switches and that there is a common offloading framework that works across operators,” the official added.The government wants operators to ensure that Voice over Wi-Fi (VoWiFi) works properly, including emergency calls, standard text messages over the internet, and multimedia calling services, while ensuring that all authentication and data transport mechanisms shall comply with national security directives and lawful interception, according to the draft rules.The rules also want operators to support open roaming and interoperability between different vendors to allow Wi-Fi offloading to scale without friction as users move across locations and networks.The Telecommunication Engineering Centre (TEC) under the department of telecommunications (DoT) is currently working to formalize the rules.“Telecom operators have

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Payments banks are an odd hybrid—part bank, part wallet, part financial marketplace. They accept deposits like banks, but unlike full-service lenders, they are not allowed to lend.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Despite a 125-basis-point rate cut by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in 2025, government bond yields have refused to cool off, leaving a growing disconnect between the bond market and policy actions. Since the beginning of February, RBI’s Monetary Policy Committee has cut the policy repo rate by 125 bps.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. MUMBAI : IndiGo’s parent, InterGlobe Aviation Ltd, has suffered a sharp sell-off due to the operational meltdown just days before its inclusion in the Sensex, becoming the worst-performing stock to enter the benchmark index in the last 15 years, based on one-month pre-inclusion returns. BSE Index Services announced on 21 November that InterGlobe Aviation would replace Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles on the prestigious 30-scrip index on 22 December.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Shares of InterGlobe Aviation Ltd, which runs IndiGo, are unlikely to stage a major recovery once the stock joins the Sensex on 22 December as investors await clarity on regulatory overhang, but its inclusion in the benchmark index could provide downside protection, several analysts told Mint.

UPI, handles roughly 3% of UPI’s daily volume; Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS), designed for large-value transfers between banks and businesses, processes in a full day what UPI clears within minutes; and for every credit card transaction in the country, there are nearly 40 UPI payments.Each system serves a different purpose, but the comparison underscores how dramatically the centre of gravity in India’s payment landscape has shifted.This pattern demonstrates that UPI’s rise is not merely a technological upgrade; it reflects a deeper behavioural shift in how routine payment activity is conducted across the country.That success story is real, but it is also incomplete. When a single system becomes this dominant, national aggregates start to tell us less and less about what is actually happening on the ground.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Financial services stocks in India could benefit from strong tailwinds in 2026, driven by rising incomes, digital penetration, and structural reforms.​ Healthy credit growth, improving asset quality, margin expansion from lower interest rates, and stable deposits, position banks and NBFCs for earnings upgrades. One company that has managed to ride the tailwinds and grow dramatically over the years is Bajaj Finance.

At the heart of this transformation lies the “Mutual Funds Sahi Hain” campaign, which not only democratized mutual fund investing but also played a pivotal role in advancing financial inclusion.

GeM is a Section 8 company established under the administrative control of the Department of Commerce, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, for procuring goods and services by central ministries, State Departments, PSEs, and Autonomous Bodies. In India, the GeM has emerged as a game-changer in public procurement, creating an open and inclusive platform that benefits not just government buyers but also local entrepreneurs, startups, and small businesses.

Dr Manmohan Singh Fellowships', a programme where 50 mid-level professionals with 10 years' experience in their respective areas will be selected every year and mentored by some senior party leaders for their political career and leadership-building. While party functionaries Praveen Chakravarty and K Raju said those who will be selected for the fellowship have to show full-time commitment to enter politics with an absolute conviction for secular, progressive politics, it remains to be seen how the Congress Party, NSUI and Youth Congress' activists, who slug it out on the streets without mentorships and fellowships, will respond to this latest in a series of novel experiments — an invite for lateral entries.

India Fintech Foundation (IFF)—the proposed self-regulatory organisation (SRO) for the fintech industry, also known as the SRO-Fintech Development Foundation (SROFT-DF). Present at the the launch event was Amitabh Kant, India’s G20 Sherpa, Shri NS Viswanathan, former Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and Non-Executive Chairman of Axis Bank and Sanjiv Singh, Joint Secretary, DPIIT. Kant formally unveiled the IFF logo, marking the official inauguration of the Foundation. The proposed SRO aims to bridge the regulatory gap by enabling innovation while ensuring responsible conduct and consumer protection. The chief guests emphasised the need for inclusive fintech growth anchored in effective industry-led self-regulation. Viswanathan will serve as Chairman of the IFF Board, guiding the long-term vision of the proposed SRO.