Provident Financial News

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. MUMBAI : It has been over a year since the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) intervened to promote discipline in the country’s booming derivatives market, yet retail investors continue to wade into high-risk futures and options (F&O) trading.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The Sabka Bima Sabki Raksha (Amendment of Insurance Laws) Bill, 2025, introduced in the Lok Sabha on 16 December, represents the most significant reform of India’s insurance sector in decades. The bill seeks to amends three core laws—the Insurance Act, 1938; the LIC Act, 1956; and the IRDAI Act, 1999—to liberalise foreign investment, strengthen regulation, introduce new intermediaries, and accelerate insurance penetration in line with the government’s goal of ‘insurance for all by 2047’.

RailTel Corp., a state-owned telecom infrastructure and connectivity provider, is in talks with Elon Musk’s Starlink to offer retail broadband services to its users in remote areas using satellite internet, according to two officials aware of the matter.“The discussions have picked up pace with Starlink, but commercials are yet to be finalized. Starlink team has also met RailTel’s officials in New Delhi,” the first of the two government officials said, requesting anonymity as talks are private.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Company Outsider is a weekly newsletter by Sundeep Khanna. Subscribe to Mint's newsletters to get them directly in your email inbox. For two decades, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) was synonymous with building.

₹5,000 crore into three loss-making and financially weak public sector general insurers—United India Insurance Co. (UIIC), National Insurance Co.

education. Operational powers will be split across three independent councils, each dealing separately with regulation, accreditation, and academic standards.

The bill was tabled by Shivraj Singh Chouhan, minister for rural development and agriculture & farmers’ welfare.Mint reported on 15 December that the proposed legislation seeks to provide a statutory guarantee of 125 days of wage employment, up from the current 100 days, in every financial year to each rural household whose adult members are willing to undertake unskilled manual work.The scheme will operate as a centrally-sponsored scheme, with the Union government bearing 90% of the financial burden for north-eastern and Himalayan states and Union territories, and 60% for other states. Respective states will need to stump up the rest.The expenditure under the scheme will depend on the number of persons reporting for work, the applicable wage rate, and the material and administrative components of the work.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Artificial intelligence might turn the world’s most valuable private company into one of the world’s most valuable publicly traded companies in 2026. This, of course, is about Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, which he believes can become an AI player after essentially inventing the modern space business and creating the first killer space application, satellite broadband, enabled by lower launch costs.

Last week, the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) released a working paper on ‘Generative AI and Copyright,’ recommending a ‘hybrid model’ that it claims will balance the need to promote AI development with creator rights. It suggests that AI companies in India should pay a mandatory blanket licence fee (a percentage of their global revenue) for using copyrighted materials to train their models. It recommends the establishment of a body called the Copyright Royalties Collective for AI Training (CRCAT) that will collect licence fees from AI developers for distribution to registered creators through existing Collective Management Organisations (CMOs).

It has been 10 years since the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris (CoP-21), where 195 states made a historic commitment to work together to keep the long-term rise in global temperatures well below 2° Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the rise to no more than 1.5° Celsius. France played its part in making this great moment of universal solidarity a success. A decade later, we can be proud of how far we have come.In France, we have reduced our greenhouse-gas emissions by 30% compared with 1990, including 20% between 2017 and 2024.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. With significant easing in inflation and expectations of it remaining softer than projected earlier, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) cut the repo rate by 25 basis points (bps) to 5.25% in its 5 December policy meeting. With this, the repo rate is down by 125bps in 2025, from 6.50% in January to 5.25% now.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. After four decades of shaping India’s mass car market, Maruti Suzuki is drawing on an old playbook as it prepares to enter the electric vehicle (EV) segment, choosing to build customer confidence and supporting infrastructure before launching its debut model. The move comes even as rivals scale up sales and questions persist over whether it has arrived late to the electric transition.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. India’s space technology is no longer just for scientists or policy experts; it’s becoming a real business opportunity. Companies are now making radar systems, satellite communication tools, precision electronics, and advanced mapping technology that support every space mission.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Indian equity benchmarks closed a volatile session on Monday with marginal losses, mirroring the caution in broader global markets. Nifty 50 closed 33.35 points lower at 26,013.60, while Sensex shed 54.38 points to settle at 85,213.28.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Tata Consultancy Services Ltd’s takeover of Coastal Cloud in its largest acquisition since going public wasn’t a one-off—it is the seventeenth such buyout of a Salesforce-centric firm by an Indian software services provider in the past decade. Yet, the focus on creating products for Salesforce systems has become increasingly vital as artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes businesses.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Snabbit, an on-demand home services provider, is in talks to raise $100 million-120 million from new and existing investors at a likely valuation of $500 million-550 million, three people with knowledge of the development said. “The company has begun talks to raise a new funding round.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. President Trump’s top envoys launched two days of meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders on Sunday as the administration stepped up pressure on Kyiv to put aside its resistance and agree to a peace deal with Russia by year-end. The talks between Ukraine and its Western partners have become a tug of war, even without Russia at the table.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. PROVIDENCE, R.I.—Tristan Keyser-Parker, a senior at Brown University, was in a workshop inside the school’s Barus & Holley engineering building Saturday afternoon when he heard someone yell “Intruder!" Keyser-Parker sprinted with about 30 students out a side entrance as police converged on the building. The students fled to the third story of a nearby dorm, where they sat, stunned, on the floor.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The $901 billion defense-policy bill passed by the House would codify more than a dozen of President Trump’s executive orders, authorizing major weapons programs, troop deployments and international-security assistance. The Senate is expected to take it up in the week ahead.

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. At the end of her charming novel Rukmini Aunty and the R.K. Narayan Fan Club, Sita Bhaskar quotes the Scottish writer Alexander McCall Smith’s admiration for the much-loved creator of Malgudi Days, first published as a collection of short stories in 1943, and later turned into a popular TV series in 1986.