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Mint.“In the early days of covid-19, those drawdowns were extraordinary, unprecedented. It is pretty minimal right now,” said Rekate.

Foreign investors appear to be finding comfort in India’s power sector amid heightened geopolitical tensions and energy market disruptions, drawn by rising demand for electricity and growing data centre capacity.They bought power stocks worth $497 million in February, according to data from the National Securities Depository Ltd. That marked the strongest inflow by foreign investors since they pumped in $517 million in April 2024.Several power stocks delivered solid gains in February, when the benchmark Nifty 50 index slipped 0.6%.

F&O segment has evolved into a critical pillar of India’s capital market infrastructure.But success, as often happens in financial markets, brings new challenges.The debate today is no longer about whether derivatives are necessary. The concern instead revolves around the scale and nature of retail participation, particularly in short-dated options.Data over the last few years has shown a clear pattern: a large proportion of retail traders in options incur net losses.

offshore crypto holdings and transactions will increasingly become visible to tax authorities through automatic cross-border data sharing.The development comes against the backdrop of India’s crypto tax regime introduced in the Union budget 2022 that imposed a 30% tax on gains from virtual digital assets and a 1% tax deducted at source (TDS) on transactions. The high tax and compliance burden is nudging many traders to shift activity offshore, making cross-border reporting frameworks increasingly important.Before these regulations, the reporting structure for crypto was fragmented and voluntary.

TCS even though there was no IT industry to speak of. What followed was one of the great acts of industrial creation in post-independence India.The foundations of what is today a $300 billion industry were built on his clarity about the opportunity.

Digital commerce in India has become a theatre of quiet deception. Sellers cheat by design, and in the rush of a 10-minute grocery delivery, hundreds of millions of consumers rarely notice they are being fleeced.In 1919, John Maynard Keynes marvelled at the Londoner who could order by phone “various products of the whole earth” from his bed while sipping his morning tea. A century later, India has democratized this convenience through cheap smartphones and a national system of instant mobile payments, overtaking the US to emerge as the second-largest e-retail market after China by number of shoppers.Yet, this innovation is being hijacked by ‘dark patterns’—design elements that trick users into overpaying or paying for things they never wanted.

A Japanese maker of high-tech toilets has been causing a splash in the world of artificial intelligence (AI). Activist investor Palliser Capital recently called on the management of Toto, best known for its Washlet bidets, to highlight that the firm is a growing AI play, thanks to its advanced ceramics segments. Toto is the “most undervalued and overlooked AI memory beneficiary,” Palliser wrote.

Edited excerpts:I think the move into this role happened quite naturally for me. When you understand the product deeply, it becomes much easier to sell or convince people because you know exactly what you’re talking about. My investment banking and research background helped a lot in that sense.

Mint.The proposal follows recommendations by the Drugs Technical Advisory Board (DTAB) at a meeting held in February. The board also called for a strict ban on sales to minors and closer monitoring of online platforms to prevent easy access.In India, NRT products including nicotine gums and lozenges are regulated as drugs under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act as they are used to reduce tobacco dependence.

India’s telecom giants and global technology firms are locked in a tussle over pricing and regulation of the country’s business internet backbone.At the centre of the clash are Domestic Leased Circuits (DLCs)—dedicated, high-security broadband lines used by banks, data centres and enterprises. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) is conducting its first review of these tariffs in more than a decade, which could slash price caps that have been unchanged since 2014.The total revenue earned by service providers from DLCs in FY 2023–24 is around ₹13,300 crore, which is approximately 60% higher than the revenue earned in FY 2012–13, according to Trai.Mobile operators, including Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, are defending their turf, arguing that government intervention would amount to a subsidy for Big Tech.

India’s manufacturing sector is doing better than we thought, as the Union statistics ministry’s revised GDP estimates showed last week. The purchasing managers index (PMI) could have a told-you-so moment, given how it has been showing robust readings now for an extended period. The HSBC India Manufacturing PMI, compiled by S&P Global, rose to a four-month high of 56.9 in February.

Information technology services has been among the most talked-about sectors in the Indian market over the past few days, driven by sharp swings in sentiment and price action.On Tuesday the Nifty IT Index slipped nearly 4% to its lowest in about 10 months, highlighting the extent of the pressure on technology stocks. However, the trend seemed to reverse on 25 February, when Indian IT stocks staged a strong rebound.

Revised estimates of India’s gross domestic product (GDP) released on Friday by the statistics ministry show a slightly smaller output pie than previously estimated, but testify to the Indian economy’s resilience. The new GDP series with 2022-23 as its base year pegs growth in 2025-26 at 7.6%, higher than 7.4% estimated under the old series with base year 2011-12. The slowdown of 2024-25 also turns out far milder, with GDP expansion slowing to 7.1% from 7.2% the year before, instead of 6.5% from 9.2%.

, she was reading a book called “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage,” about a woman disentangling the family finances after her husband of 20 years abruptly leaves her. While Adhikari had no concerns about her husband running off, the book did get her thinking about how little she knew of their monetary logistics.

From gross domestic product (GDP) growth easing in the December quarter, to the government outlining a nearly ₹17 trillion asset monetization pipeline, IT stocks extending losses amid AI-driven concerns, India weighing contingency plans for crude oil imports, and a moderation in salary hikes, here’s a compilation of this week’s news in numbers.India's economy likely grew at 7.8% during the December quarter, slowing from 8.4% in the previous quarter, due to slower growth in agriculture and the non-manufacturing industrial sectors, and government spending cuts, data released on Friday showed. GDP growth is estimated at 7.6% for 2025-26, up from 7.1% in the previous year.

India’s economy is now officially smaller than previously thought. New GDP estimates released on Friday based on an updated methodology and base year have reduced the country’s nominal output by over ₹11 trillion ($133 billion), validating earlier concerns about the size of the economyThe downward revision may complicate the government’s fiscal arithmetic for FY26 and FY27, and may also delay India’s chances of becoming a $4-trillion economy, and the fourth largest economy leaving Japan behind.Over the past decade, questions were raised by researchers, economists and policymakers, including former chief economic advisor Arvind Subramanian, over the methodology used in the 2011-12 series and the size of India’s GDP.GDP data released on Friday by the statistics ministry based on the updated 2022-23 base year, showed India’s nominal GDP in 2025-26 at ₹345.47 trillion ($3.93 trillion), 3.26% smaller than the ₹357.14 trillion figure given in January based on the 2011-12 series.This downward trend (2.9-3.8%) is visible across all four years for which data based on the 2022-23 series has been released.“This has happened because 2011-12 data was likely overestimating figures as organized sector data was largely used to extrapolate figures for other sectors,” an official involved in the GDP calculation process explained, requesting anonymity.The revised GDP takes into account several steps to capture the economy better such as the integration of goods and services tax (GST), expanding the use of double deflation and using improved deflation techniques in case of single deflation, and using survey results to capture the informal economy instead of relying on proxies.P.C.

Grade-A office spaces are seeing faster absorption buoyed by favourable demand-supply dynamics, thus pushing vacancies lower. All-India (aggregate of top-seven cities) vacancy levels in the December quarter (Q3FY26) declined further to 12.3% from 12.7% in Q2 and 13.9% in Q3FY25, showed Propstack data compiled by Kotak Institutional Equities.Global capability centres (GCCs) and flexible-space operators continue to dominate demand.

On Tuesday, information technology industry body Nasscom projected a flat pace of growth for India’s tech services sector in the coming fiscal years. The previous day, brokerage firm Jefferies reduced its target prices of India’s Big Four IT firms.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. IDFC First Bank’s investors are shaken, pulling the stock down as much as 20% following reports of a fraud at the fast-growing lender. What began as a disappointing de-empanelment of IDFC and AU Small Finance Bank by the Haryana government—affecting 0.5% of their deposits—quickly evolved into something far more unsettling.

In his book Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy, economist W. Brian Arthur explains how institutional outcomes often persist not because they are efficient, but because early deviations alter the payoff structure of future choices. Once a sub-optimal equilibrium is reached, coordination effects and adaptive expectations lock it in.

India is currently running two payment systems in parallel. On one side is its gleaming showcase, UPI, with 21.7 billion transactions in January 2026 worth ₹28.33 trillion in value. On the other side is the system of physical cash.