Information Financial News

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New Delhi: Armed with a favourable Supreme Court decision, India’s tax authority plans to proceed with caution while reopening assessment against Tiger Global Management LLC’s 2018 stake sale in Flipkart Pvt., respecting the company’s right to appeal, according to two officials familiar with the matter.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New Delhi: The Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) has penalised Flipkart and Meta Platforms with a fine of ₹10 lakh each for allowing the sale and promotion of walkie-talkie devices on their platforms without mandatory regulatory disclosures and approvals, widening its crackdown on e-commerce marketplaces for violating consumer protection rules.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. For a long time, we have been banking on India’s demographic dividend, or the fact that we have a high proportion of young people in our population. For this demographic dividend to fulfil its economic potential, young citizens need to be skilled and employable.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. India's new data protection regime makes a seemingly simple promise: if an app can take consent in a tap, it must allow users to withdraw it just as easily. But in digital lending—where loans are priced, monitored and sometimes recovered using a steady stream of personal data—that promise is already running into the realities of regulated credit.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. IRANIANS ARE accustomed to losing access to phone and internet services during unrest. The internet was cut off during protests in 2019 and during another big wave of demonstrations in 2022.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Paramount Skydance plans to launch a proxy fight for board seats at Warner Bros. Discovery, the company said Monday, as it continues pushing its hostile bid for the company.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Like it or not, artificial intelligence is here to stay, and financial planners are going to have to start thinking about how they can use it to support their practices. The Financial Planning Association has some ideas.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. As urban spaces rage with protests, Iran seems in turmoil again. Is America’s long squeeze of Iran’s economy at work? Or a classic “oil curse"? The stir was set off by an inflation flare-up caused by a crash in the Iranian rial.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A couple of years ago, I wrote about how India remains, at its core, a fixed-income country. I pointed out that even the Public Provident Fund (PPF)—arguably the best fixed-income option available—delivered only about ₹60 lakh over 44 years of systematic investing.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. On Wednesday, the same day that the National Statistics Office published its first advance estimate of GDP for 2025-26, the government announced that India’s long-overdue census will kick off on 1 April 2026. The coincidence is apt, even if unintended.

the DPIIT’s plan, announced on 8 December, for standard AI royalties won’t work because it is difficult to separate commercial AI use from the very early stages, where it might have been a non-profit or research project.Industry body Nasscom, which represented technology companies within DPIIT’s working panel on the AI copyright royalty proposal, published a ‘dissent note’ against the framework on 17 December.“Individual creators, especially small and specialized ones, would no longer decide whether their work is used for training, and would lose the possibility of earning a right to negotiate the terms of any deal,” the note said. “In practice, what creators receive would depend on how the central body and collective management organizations are governed, how registration with them would work, and whether their distribution rules would recognize niche, regional and emerging work,” it added.The government, however, believes that while challenges raised by the technology industry will be taken into account, regulating the usage of copyrighted data in AI models is necessary.“Concerns of plagiarism have existed for a long time, and copyright is recognized as a form of intellectual property in order to encourage creativity.

On New Year’s Eve, India woke up to gig workers logging off en masse, turning a day of celebration into a flashpoint over wages, incentives and the true cost of app-based work.The strike finally failed to really take off, as many riders chose to work after Swiggy and Zomato rolled out special incentives. Zomato offered peak-hour payouts of ₹120– ₹150 per order and waived penalties for refusals and cancellations, enabling riders to earn up to ₹3,000 in a day, according to a letter reviewed by Mint.

Today, more than half of all data breach incidents target personally identifiable information—tax identities, passport numbers, biometric data and the like. In most instances, this information was collected and stored to comply with know-your-customer (KYC) obligations.

Mint review of usage practices and public policies across X, Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT found that safeguards on such content are not uniform across companies.As MeitY’s notice put X under scrutiny, policy and AI experts pointed to a key policy gap that appears to have placed Grok in the government’s firing line even as other platforms have so far avoided similar action.On 2 January, the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) issued a notice to X seeking details on how the platform acts against objectionable content and how it plans to address sexual content. The move followed concerns over how Grok, which is embedded within X (formerly Twitter), can be used to modify photographs into content that could be deemed sexual, obscene, or violative of a user’s privacy.Mint has seen a copy of the notice which had set time until Monday for X's reply.X has sought more time to respond to Meity's notice, meanwhile.

Addressing at least 300 company executives in a virtual townhall in the last week of December, Joshi nudged the senior leaders to get closer to the 15% operating margin by March this year, according to two people privy to the development.London-based Joshi, who took over the top job two years ago, is also pushing teams to accelerate AI training for employees, win more deals at higher rates, and reduce the time staff spend away from projects, said the people quoted earlier–they asked not to be identified as details are not public.Tech Mahindra CEO’s push to win more revenue comes as the company lags its large information technology (IT) services peers in growth. The Pune-based company is nearing the final phase of Project Fortius, a three-year turnaround roadmap unveiled in April 2024.

Generative AI is trained on vast amounts of information to “understand” and generate human-like language. In simple terms, it functions like a super-intelligent research assistant for tax departments.One of its most immediate applications is document summarization.

₹99 here, ₹249 there, ₹1,200 occasionally. These small unauthorized debits, fake subscription renewals, or wrong UPI transfers don’t make headlines, but they quietly erode a family’s monthly surplus.AI has amplified this problem. Scammers no longer rely on clumsy phishing messages.

Mint.During the hour-long meeting, X executives explained how the image-editing feature functioned. They offered an example: if billionaire Elon Musk appeared in a photograph alongside other technology executives and users prompted the tool to remove “the most racist person”, Grok might remove Musk, this person said.The explanation failed to reassure regulators.

₹1 crore for high courts and ₹2 crore for the Supreme Court), pendency reduction has been marginal, reflecting a culture of litigation as bureaucratic insurance rather than legal necessity.This culture stems from several institutionalized incentives that make ‘default litigation’ the path of least resistance.Audit and vigilance frameworks indirectly treat unappealed losses as negligence; accounting codes of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) require every audit objection to be ‘settled’ or ‘explained,’ and an appeal offers safe harbour from being questioned, while a liberal appellate framework allows virtually automatic filing.Despite calls for a binding national litigation policy, successive governments have balked.Instead, we now have a ‘Directive for Efficient and Effective Management of Litigation’ (April 2025), which introduces nodal officers, legal cells and MIS dashboards, but lacks statutory teeth, performance-linked disincentives or real-time data integrity.LIMBS itself remains under-updated and fails to track reasons for appeal.Here is a five-point agenda for inclusion in a national litigation policy. First, India must move away from its open-ended appeal culture and adopt a ‘leave-to-litigate’ system that acts as a regulatory filter.

Even as Vodafone Idea has received a breather on most of its adjusted gross revenue dues, a near-term obligation remains. The telecom operator will need to pay ₹700–800 crore in AGR dues related to FY18 and FY19 over six years, including the current financial year, according to two officials familiar with the matter.This amount is outside the ₹87,695 crore in AGR dues as of 31 December 2025, which the government has frozen, and Vodafone Idea will pay it between FY32 and FY41.The reassessment process to arrive at Vodafone Idea’s final AGR liability is expected to take four to five months, one of the officials said.“In the Supreme Court’s 1 September 2020 order, the table of AGR calculations also included figures for FY18 and FY19.

lawsuits were filed in the last week of December by individuals in states including Arizona and California, who claimed they lost sensitive personal data such as financial account details, social security numbers, and addresses. Mint could not independently ascertain whether Cognizant intends to settle the claims.The 23 December complaint alleged that Cognizant did not disclose critical details of the cyberattack.“Defendants (Cognizant) have not disclosed the details of the cyberattack to Plaintiffs (complainants) or Class members, including the root cause of the data breach, the vulnerabilities exploited, and the remedial measures undertaken to ensure such a breach does not occur again.