'There is also a possibility that Andhra Pradesh may demand a similar package. But as of now, we are only working on a package for Bihar.'

The Sittwe deal is more significant than Chabahar in Iran, where India has rights to operate only two terminals and not the port itself.

From April 1, when we buy insurance for a car or take out a health cover, insurance companies can offer a product totally customised for us.

To offer additional support at the low end of the income ranges, the Centre will consider a large-scale jump in exemption rates under the old income-tax regime in the vote on account, or interim Budget, according to a senior official in the know. Those will include an extension of the income tax exemption rates close to Rs 7 lakh and additional measures for women farmers.

Compulsory retirement is part of a half-yearly exercise now for cases where government wants to weed out officers, but without taking the disciplinary proceedings route.

Parliament has cleared the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2023, recently. The objective of the Act is to invite investments from the private sector, including foreign companies, for mining minerals such as lithium and other critical minerals. Other than lithium, some of these minerals were classified as atomic minerals, including beryl and beryllium, niobium, titanium, tantalum and zirconium.

'If we want faster growth and want greater flow of credit towards the private sector, it's important to have many more of such large entities.'

One of the challenges for those car graves is that Indian owners often find markets for their old cars rather than send them to scrapyards.

'We plan to add over 100,000 square kilometres every year, to reach an ambitious target of 500,000 square kilometres by 2025.'

Faced with one setback after another in expanding the scope of mining in the country, almost all the major miners of the world have wound down their operations in India.

Only NIIF has stayed the course as a viable infrastructure financing institution.

In the new Parliament House, with a soft launch this Winter Session, paper is expected to disappear. For the guidance of ministers, secretaries can scribble notes on linked pads even from their offices to respond to queries from members.

Earlier this year, the Union Cabinet gave the management of state-run companies the freedom to decide on divesting their subsidiaries. However, the very next day a meeting was held at the top level of the Government of India, for the presentation of proposals for more autonomy for state-run companies. Interestingly, no chiefs of any of these companies were invited. It is a problem that will stare the government in the face with the state-owned banks too, as talks have again begun for inviting strategic investments in these companies.

Way before the rains arrived at Talwandi Sabo Power plant in Punjab, the one check the coal ministry was carrying out was the availability of coal stock with the generator. Talwandi Sabo Power Limited (TSPL), the 1,980-Mw thermal power plant of Sterlite Energy, part of the Vedanta Group, which supplies about 15 per cent of Punjab's power, is one of the most difficult locations to manage coal supplies. It is nearly 1,700 km from the mines of Mahanadi Coalfields in Odisha, the longest coal route in India and possibly the trickiest as it cuts through the traffic heavy rail lines between Delhi and eastern India.

Overcoming its initial concerns, national reinsurer GIC Re has contributed to the formation of an insurance pool to cover most imports from Russia. While it will be called the fertiliser pool with a corpus of Rs 500 crore, it can be used to cover the risks of oil and gas imports too. This was decided by a clutch of Indian insurance companies, led by the state-owned ones. GIC Re's share is about 40 per cent in the pool. Last month, GIC Re had shot off a letter to all non-life insurance companies that underwrite marine risks not to ask it for reinsurance of cargoes that originate from Russia.

In a first, the Comptroller and Auditor General's (CAG) officers reached out to several ministries in the last week of April as part of a confidence-boosting measure. The meeting brought the CAG officials and those from the ministries across the table to discuss the pain points in their relations. CAG of India Girish Chandra Murmu took this novel step because of growing tensions between those audited and the auditor.

'For the common man, the economic conditions are not going to get better.'

In the excitement over the allocation of bank licences for the private sector, a new category of licence offered by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) last year went almost unnoticed. That was when the RBI consolidated the rules for prepaid payment instruments (PPI), popularly understood as e-wallets or gift cards. In the process, the regulator has fast-forwarded a bottom-up card usage industry in India that is completely different from the world of bank-linked credit and debit cards.

Aadhaar is falling behind on technology, missing out on confidentiality and has gaps in its data archiving policy and preserving confidentiality in delivery of the cards to people, says a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG). The performance report, 'Functioning Of Unique Identification Authority Of India', tabled in Parliament on the last day of the budget session notes, assigning a unique identity to all resident Indians was supposed to be the key feature of Aadhaar. But "There were instances of issue of Aadhaar with the same biometric data to different residents indicating flaws in the de-duplication process and issue of Aadhaar on faulty biometrics and documents". It says close to half a million such records had to be cancelled by the Unique Identification Authority of India up to 2016.

Since January this year, Indian exporters have begun to dread the shipping news. That's because most of it would be about another lot of shipping companies deciding to avoid Indian ports on account of delays.