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NCLT) has approved the merger of Kiranakart Technologies, which operates quick commerce platform Zepto, with its Singaporean affiliate entity Kiranakart Pte Ltd—a move that will help accelerate its initial public offering (IPO) plans in India this year. Zepto’s domicile flip to India will formally complete within the next 30 days, a person aware of the matter said, adding that this was one of the fastest approvals of its kind from the tribunal. “The scheme appears to be fair and reasonable and (it) is not in violation of any provisions of law and is not contrary to public policy,” the Mumbai bench of NCLT observed in its January 9 order.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in the third quarter, regarded as having been below par, should not be seen in isolation but in the context of macroeconomic factors impacting spends, CEO and MD K Krithivasan told Beena Parmar & Surabhi Agarwal in an interview. He also spoke about early signs of revival, how the new US regime is expected to be more business friendly and competition from global capability centres (GCCs). Edited excerpts: How do you react to the December quarter being termed as the poorest Q3 performance in several years? We have to see context also… we know that for a long period now, we have been going through a phase where there is market uncertainty, less intent to spend on behalf of clients. If you had a previous few quarters which were super and then suddenly this drops, then you can say this is a bad performance. So, see (the last quarter) in the context of how the overall growth environment is. Taking it in isolation and saying that this is a worse performance (may not be right).

Infosys is set to roll out its annual pay hikes from February, ushering in the New Year on a happy note for its employees. The country's second largest software exporter will hand out letters to employees falling at job level five (JL5) and below next month with the raise effective retrospectively from January 1. Those at JL6 and above will receive their letter in March with the hike taking effect from April, a senior company executive told employees at an Infosys Validation Services unit (IVS unit) town hall on Friday, people briefed on the subject told ET.

Ather Energy is set to value itself at as much as $2.4 billion in its upcoming initial public offering (IPO), people briefed on the matter said. That’s a premium of more than 80% over the last funding round in August, when it turned unicorn, they said. Ather is expected to file its updated draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) later this month or the first week of February after sending final clarifications to the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), said the people. In contrast to the series of new-age businesses’ listings last year that took a cautious approach to valuation, the likes of Ather and Bluestone are likely to price their offerings at a premium, reflecting their own plans as well as the competitive landscape.

decarbonising hard-to-abate sectors such as thermal power, iron and steel, and cement plants, people familiar with the matter told ET. The contours of the mission are being firmed up and an announcement could be made in the February budget, they said. This mission will be in line with India's goals to halve carbon emissions by 2050 and attain netzero emissions by 2070. «Discussions are on, on the contours of the mission… details are being worked out,» a senior government official said. A committee under the chairmanship of the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) is in place for defining the requirement and timeline of this mission and scheme needed to implement the goals, the person said.Asecond official said two meetings of this committee have already taken place.

Flipkart is in advanced discussions to lead a $35–40 million funding in its fintech venture, Super.money, which for the first time may see external investors also joining the round but with the web-retailer retaining its majority ownership, people in the know of the matter said. Super.money, started by Flipkart senior executive Prakash Sikaria, is among the big focus areas at Flipkart for its financial services and lending business and has emerged as one of the fastest growing Unified Payments Interface (UPI) apps. It surpassed Amazon Pay last month in terms of volume with more than 100 million UPI transactions, as per National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) data. Super.money is emerging as a rival to payments firms like PhonePe — previously part of the Flipkart group — and others. The Flipkart-led latest funding will set the valuation benchmark for the fintech venture that will be scaled aggressively in 2025.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. ‘It’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.’ That may have been Sir Winston Churchill's oblique description of Stalin's Russia, but he may well have been referring to modern India. Closer home, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen's view is equally relevant: ‘Whatever you can say about India, the opposite is also true.’ The fact is, India has never been easy to read.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Global investors are increasingly prioritizing assets with a strong environmental, social and governance (ESG) footprint, driving up their value and putting ESG at the forefront of deal-making strategies in India, according to a top executive of global transaction advisory firm Alvarez & Marsal (A&M).

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The instant commerce avalanche has caught Avenue Supermarts Ltd's DMart Ready stores off-guard, forcing India's largest listed retailer to shutter many of these pick-up points and shift focus to the home delivery space. Avenue Supermarts rolled out the DMart Ready model following the covid pandemic outbreak in 2020, where customers could order online and collect groceries from a pick-up point.

Josh Hartnett steps into the lead role in Fight or Flight, an action thriller set on an aircraft. The actor performs his own stunts, showcasing intense physicality and dedication to the role. Josh Hartnett has a history of action roles, appearing in films like Wrath of Man and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. For Fight or Flight, he revealed that he performed all his own stunts despite the physical demands. The most challenging sequence involved fighting numerous adversaries in a confined plane cabin while using onboard items as weapons. At 45 during filming, Hartnett admitted that recovering from such physically taxing scenes was more difficult than in his earlier years. Also Read: Severance Season 1 Free Streaming: All you may want to know about premiere date and where to watch

Business correspondents (BCs)-who process thousands of crores of rupees daily in domestic remittances-have urged the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to relax the restrictions it had imposed on monthly and daily transfers 14 years ago, according to people aware of the development. They have written to the RBI, requesting it to double the monthly transfer limit to ₹50,000 and reduce the requirement of a two-factor authentication (2FA) to once a month from it being needed for every transaction now, the people cited earlier told ET. This comes after the BCs complained to the regulator about the misuse of its latest domestic money transfer rules that mandate KYC (know-your-customer) checks of every remitter.

India, too, has its share of quirky regulations. Until recently, kite-flying required a permit under the Indian Aircraft Act of 1934, as kites were classified as 'aircraft'. Delhi barbers are still legally obliged to maintain a register of every haircut performed. These outdated laws, often harmless on the surface, highlight a deeper problem: absence of an institutionalised system for regulatory review. Without mechanisms to periodically evaluate and repeal redundant laws, governance becomes riddled with inefficiencies, eroding public trust and creating unnecessary friction.

However, 2025 brings promising news for four zodiac signs—Aries, Libra, Virgo, and Pisces. Media report predicts life will get significantly easier for them this year. After navigating a year of challenges, these signs can expect emotional and spiritual growth, improved relationships, and a renewed sense of purpose, as mentioned in a report by Your Tango.

Income Tax (I-T) department has set the ground to tap Interpol for information on the current whereabouts, identity, and hidden assets of tax dodgers. A standard operating procedure has been circulated for initiating requests to Interpol, the world's largest international police organisation with 194 member countries, sources told ET. While tax evasion is a criminal offence and may attract penalty and even imprisonment, the I-T department does not seek the help of Interpol in going after tax fraud offenders. However, learning from past experiences, the tax office believes that accessing the latest information on such fugitives-their locations, front entities, and details of newly acquired assets-would help to freeze bank accounts and other assets faster.

Steel Authority of India and John Cockerill India will jointly invest around ₹6,000 crore on setting up a downstream plant for steel, which will be used for the production of cold-rolled grain-oriented and cold-rolled non-oriented types of electrical steel, sources aware of the development said. The hot-rolled coils (HRCs), a form of finished steel to be used as raw material for this plant, will be supplied from SAIL, while the downstream unit itself is likely to be set up at one of SAIL's existing plants, they said. While a final call on where the plant will be set up is yet to be made, the project is expected to come on-board between 2027 and 2029, they said. In November last year, SAIL had signed a memorandum of understanding with John Cockerill India for green steel technologies and innovation, with a focus on carbon steel, green steel and silicon steel.

Kaja Kallas, the European Union foreign policy chief, said the foreign ministers would convene in Brussels on January 27 in an effort to decide how the 27-nation bloc would relax sanctions on Syria. After 13 years of civil war, Syria's President Bashar al-Assad was ousted in a lightning offensive by insurgent forces led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham a month ago. The group has since set up a caretaker government in Damascus. Any European decision to ease sanctions would be conditional on the new Syrian administration's approach to governing, which must include «different groups» and women and «no radicalisation», Kallas said, without elaborating. «If we see the developments going to the right direction, we are ready to do the next steps...If we see that it's not going to the right direction, then we can also move back on this.»

Adani Group will invest Rs 65,000 crore in energy and cement projects in Chhattisgarh, the conglomerate said Sunday. Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani met Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Vishnu Deo Sai on Sunday and announced an investment of Rs 60,000 crore to expand the group's power plants in Raipur, Korba and Raigarh in the state. The expansion will enhance Chhattisgarh's power generation capacity by 6,120 MW, a company statement said. Adani Power is India's top private thermal power producer. It is targeting to double its thermal power capacity to 30.67 GW by 2029-30 from 15 GW currently. The firm said last month it was exploring options of investing Rs 20,000 crore to set up a coal-fired ultra-supercritical thermal power plant in Bihar.

CII has backed further simplification of the regulatory framework, expansion of the ambit of the national single-window system (NSWS) portal and revamp of the alternative dispute resolution (ADR) system to minimise tax disputes, among steps to make it easier for doing business in India. «Simplifying regulatory frameworks, reducing compliance burdens and enhancing transparency should continue to remain our focus agenda for the next several years,» Chandrajit Banerjee, director general of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), said in a press release on Saturday. The CII has pitched for centralised regulatory approval through NSWS, wherein all central, state- and local-level approvals are provided, bringing transparency and faster regulatory clearance for businesses. The industry body has suggested phase-wise onboarding of central ministries and states on the portal, incentivising the states to shift to the portal once the central ministries have been integrated into the portal.

Union home minister Amit Shah has set a deadline of March 2026 to wipe out Maoism from the country. Last year, 287 Naxalites were killed, 1,000 arrested and 837 Maoists surrendered in Chhattisgarh. Giving details about the operation, officials said, «The gunfight broke out in the morning at a forest in the Indravati National Park area when a joint team of security personnel was out on an anti-Naxalite operation,» said Inspector General of Police, Bastar Range, Sundarraj P.

Saturday Night Live, is set to premiere on Netflix US on January 25, 2025. This release is part of a pre-existing Pay-1 agreement between Netflix and Sony Pictures.