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With the war in Iran now in its second month, India’s cooking-gas shortage is turning serious. Policymakers must view this as more than a temporary blip; it is a crisis that may permanently shift how the world’s most-populous nation consumes energy. Electric cooktops are vanishing from shelves: Amazon’s local unit reported a 30-fold jump in sales.

Brent crude prices soaring in 2026.Brent began the year at approximately $61.98 per barrel and surged to around $114.57 by the end of trading on 27 March, following the outbreak of the Iran war on 28 February.This sharp rally of about 85% is a result of a massive geopolitical risk premium. The catalyst was the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which trapped nearly 20% of global oil supply.Physical strikes on refineries, skyrocketing maritime insurance, and speculative hedging have further strained the market.

Mint earlier reported that amid high oil prices and a supply squeeze due to the war in West Asia, OMCs halted supplies on credit to fuel retailers.On 26 March, the petroleum and natural gas ministry had said that efforts were underway to increase the supplies from one-day credit period to up to three days of supplies on credit.“In most cases, it is still advance payment. For large retailers there may be instances of a day's credit, but not all are getting that,” said Marri Amarender Reddy, general secretary of the UPDA.

Escorts Kubota, a pure-play tractor manufacturer, reported a 16% jump in sales volume for FY26. Tractors sales are more seasonal than those of other automobiles, so the focus should be on annual numbers.

OTT platforms engage a smaller but paying audience, offering higher completion rates and longer shelf life.According to the Ficci EY Media and Entertainment Report 2026, TVoD revenues in India are projected to rise from ₹500 crore in 2025 to ₹740 crore by 2028. Yet monetization remains skewed towards micro-transactions and subscription models, rather than pay-per-view-led revenue.YouTube is India’s leading ad-supported video platform by reach and watch time, reaching four out of five internet users aged 18 and above.

On 12 March, when February inflation printed at 3.2%, the war in West Asia had been raging for 13 days. Oil company retail agencies, which sell cylinders of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) at an administered price to registered users, shuttered their doors, anticipating supply cuts. Consumers were forced to turn to the informal market, where the price had risen five-fold by 12 March, relative to the regulated price even without the Ujjwala price subsidy.

Last week, the National Statistical Office (NSO) released its annual report of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) for 2025. It differs from earlier PLFS reports in its coverage and sampling design.The PLFS has been in existence since 2017, yielding annual reports for rural and urban areas along with quarterly reports for only urban India. This survey was a departure from the erstwhile Employment and Unemployment Survey (EUS).

Mint reported on 25 March that about ₹18,000 crore of planned fundraising was at risk.“There is a direct impact on the supply chain, but there is a second-order impact too, which is what we try to understand and work with our clients,” said Singh. “Based on the impact on currency, commodity and their own input pricing changes, we also do a real-time risk assessment as much as we can and make sure that the client is also aware of that.”Singh said Standard Chartered is involved in a large number of loan syndications in the country.

Consulting and auditing companies in India are clamping down on hiring or letting people go on the back of the impact of artificial intelligence and a poor pipeline of work from clients because of the domino effect of the West Asia war.Goliaths of the business—Bain & Co., Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Co., Accenture and Kearney, along with auditing giants PwC, EY, KPMG and Deloitte—have held meetings on the war and how it would affect the India headcount.“Over the last two weeks, we had meetings with senior partners and the impact of the war on business was discussed. Lateral hiring has stopped for us, unless critical, and we have been told that cost cuts are on the anvil,” said a senior partner in the consulting team of a Big Four firm.“While strategic consultants are not impacted yet, those who worked in the research teams and production services will be impacted.

The government has stripped India’s telecom regulator of oversight over television ratings, taking full control of the system that influences billions of dollars in advertising spending.The 2026 policy released last week hands complete oversight to the ministry of information and broadcasting (MIB), showed the document reviewed by Mint. Until now, both the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) and the ministry shared oversight, creating a dual system.Trai, however, continues to regulate other key aspects of the broadcasting and cable TV sector, including channel pricing, advertising limits, interconnection and distribution rules, service quality, and compliance standards.The policy has also issued guidelines to establish standards for the registration, operation, audit, and oversight of all entities engaged in providing television rating services in India.TV ratings track what millions of people watch every day and dictate where advertising money is spent.

India’s central bank further tightened its forex curbs on Wednesday by targeting the rebooking of cancelled forex derivative contracts and tightening norms around related-party transactions.If a company or trader cancels a dollar hedge, they can no longer re-enter the same trade to benefit from price movements, limiting their ability to take directional bets under the guise of hedging.Separately, banks have been barred from undertaking foreign exchange derivative contracts with related parties, as defined under the Indian Accounting Standard (Ind AS) 2.Wednesday’s moves come after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) first capped banks’ net open positions (NOP) in the domestic market at $100 million at the end of each business day on 27 March.Then, on Wednesday, Mint reported that RBI had asked banks for data on positions taken by their corporate clients, with the exercise aimed at assessing on-ground positioning rather than signalling immediate regulatory actions.The new regulations have come into effect immediately.Together, these measures aim to curb one-sided positioning in the rupee, which has been hitting successive record lows.

Mint in an emailed statement.Other companies including Turtlemint, Indo-Mim, Inframarket, Symbiotech Pharmalabs, Duroflex, and KKR-backed Leap India are also taking a more calibrated approach for a public listing in the current climate, multiple people familiar with the matter said. All these companies have secured approval from market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) to go public, according to data from Prime Database.Some of these companies have temporarily paused or deferred their IPO preparations due to concerns over valuations amid a turbulent stock market, two people said on the condition of anonymity.

MUMBAI: With just hours to spare on Tuesday evening, Avenue Supermarts Ltd, the parent company of value retailer D-Mart, announced a flurry of store openings across the country, ending the financial year with 500 stores.On Tuesday alone, the company added 12 stores across its stronghold of Maharashtra and Gujarat, and in newer regions where it is trying to build a stronger presence, including Tamil Nadu and Odisha. D-Mart opened 47 stores in March, a sharp increase from the 40-50 stores it typically has added annually over the past five years, according to its investor presentation.The company opened 85 stores in FY26, the highest number added in a financial year.

war drags on, reducing the availability of fuel for internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles and forcing the government to allow oil marketing companies (OMCs) to raise fuel prices.The running cost of EVs is relatively cheaper than ICE vehicles. The only two pure-play EV companies in India – Ola Electric Mobility Ltd and Ather Energy Ltd – present a contrast.

Mint analysis of vehicle registration data from the transport ministry’s Vahan dashboard shows that fewer than 30% of petrol passenger vehicles and two-wheelers registered in 2025 were ethanol-compliant. About 0.9 million passenger vehicles were ethanol-compliant, against a total 3.36 million registered in 2025.

With the rupee under pressure from capital outflows and higher crude prices, India’s central bank is expanding its scrutiny beyond banks to corporate treasury positions in the foreign exchange market to assess large arbitrage trades, two bankers familiar with the matter said.According to these bankers, the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) data call is aimed at assessing the extent of arbitrage exposure with corporate clients, rather than signalling immediate regulatory action.The exercise follows the central bank’s move on 27 March to cap banks’ net open positions in the domestic market at $100 million at the end of each day, which forced several lenders to unwind trades.“Corporates might have to unwind as well if things come to a head,” one of the two bankers cited earlier said, requesting anonymity. Corporate treasuries manage firms’ foreign exchange exposures through hedging to ensure that earnings and cash flows are not hit by currency swings.An email sent to the RBI on the matter remained unanswered till press time.A Jefferies report on 29 March said that the forex derivative market is dominated by larger banks with gross onshore positions of $30-40 billion that largely offset each other.

Mint that the compliance requirement is especially important for digital personal loans, buy now, pay later (BNPL), and other frequently disbursed unsecured products, where borrowing patterns can shift within days rather than months.“In a traditional monthly reporting cycle, the lifecycle of a 15-day BNPL transaction or a 30-day micro-loan is essentially a blind spot…it begins and ends before the data ever reaches the bureau,” said Aditya B. Chatterjee, managing director of credit bureau Equifax India.And borrowers “used to exploit this particular window of a blind spot in the (bureau reporting) system”, said Sugandh Saxena, chief executive of self-regulatory organization Fintech Association for Consumer Empowerment (FACE), adding that “fintechs would greatly benefit” from fresher bureau data.That is because digital NBFCs dominate the personal-loan market by volume, accounting for 78% of sanctioned loans in the first nine months of 2025-26, even though their share by value was only 19%, according to FACE data.Credit data from banks, NBFCs, and fintech lenders used to be updated with bureaus on a monthly cycle, but in practice, taking 30-45 days from disbursal to reflection in a borrower’s file.

New Delhi: Telecom gear maker Nokia said that supply chain pressures due to the West Asia war, with component shortages such as memory chips, are increasing costs for devices, including wireless access equipment and network infrastructure.“We started seeing the cost creeps happening. As soon as the supply shortage starts, the first thing is the cost changes, and that is what is happening right now,” Vibha Mehra, country manager - designate for India at Nokia, told reporters on Tuesday.Mehra, who will take charge as Nokia’s country manager in India on 1 April, said discussions about the cost increases have also begun with telecom operators.To be sure, memory chip prices had already been increasing before the war, as manufacturing capacity shifted from consumer electronics toward high-margin memory solutions for AI.

A year after it acquired AGS Health from EQT in a billion-dollar transaction, global private equity firm Blackstone has hired bankers to plan a listing for the company at three times the buy value, three people with knowledge of the development said. The company, which is now being valued upwards of $3 billion, will look to raise around $500 million from the public market listing, these people added.AGS, which provides a host of services, including medical billing, claim submission, denial management and medical coding, has appointed investment banks JM Financial, Jefferies, ICICI Securities, Nomura and JP Morgan India and others for the IPO.“It will be a mix of primary plus secondary share sale,” said one of the people cited above.

A viral video clip of McDonald’s CEO Christopher Kempczinski eating the fast-food chain’s Big Arch burger has been memed and roasted across the internet. It surely cost him a little bit of his dignity. But that’s a small price to pay for the equivalent of millions of dollars in free publicity.

A simpler income tax law will come into force from 1 April, along with other changes announced in this year’s Budget including higher benefit of deductions for salaried tax payers and a new buyback taxation scheme.The new tax regime modifies the return filing timeline in certain cases and rationalises penalties while looking to reduce complexity and encourage voluntary compliance.Mint takes a closer look at the changes that will kick in on Wednesday.The changes proposed through Finance Act of 2026, signed off by President Droupadi Murmu on Monday, include the rationalisation of certain penalties, greater leeway to update tax returns and disclose previously unreported foreign assets and income below a limit, changes to the taxes deducted or collected at source (TDS and TCS) including on overseas tour packages and education, and a new tax regime for share buybacks. From 2026-27, businesses not subjected to a tax audit will be able to file their income tax returns up to the end of August.Starting in 2026-27, taxpayers can revise their returns even after the department initiates a tax case.