Markets have started the trading session on a firm note with the Indices hitting lifetime high. The first Budget session of the 16th Lok Sabha begins today.

Indices continue to scale fresh highs on account of strong foreign inflows and budget optimism.

In a rare case of investor activism on managerial remuneration, shareholders of Tata Motors, India's biggest automotive maker, rejected compensation payment in excess of prescribed limits to three directors.

The company did not get the required 75 per cent votes in a postal ballot to compensate Executive Director (commercial vehicles) Ravindra Pisharody, Executive Director (quality) Satish Borwankar and the legal heir of former managing director Karl Slym (who died in January) in excess of the limits for the year ended March.

Mumbai: After declining for 33 consecutive months, sales of medium and heavy-duty trucks picked up in June, as an improvement in the mining sector and a pick-up in manufacturing led to some revival in demand for commercial vehicles.

With the exception of Tata Motors Ltd, the market leader in the commercial vehicles, sales at most firms, including Ashok Leyland Ltd, Eicher Motors Ltd, Volvo Eicher Commercial Vehicles Ltd and Mahindra Trucks and Buses Ltd, saw a spike.

Ratan Tata, who steered the country's biggest industrial group for two decades, said he would discuss everything, from mergers to his private life, in memoirs to be published in a Japanese newspaper.

The 76-year-old industrialist, in comments carried on Tuesday in Japanese in the Nikkei newspaper, said stepping down in December 2012 as chairman of the Tata Group, had given him a chance to reflect.

In a revival sign for the country’s troubled automobile industry, nine leading carmakers’ combined sales in June was 18 per cent higher than those in the same month last year.

A new and stable government at the Centre seemed to have bolstered consumer sentiment, as buyers returned to showrooms — the nine passenger vehicle manufacturers that released their numbers on Tuesday sold a combined 204,287 units in the month, compared with 173,624 in June 2013.

Knight Assets & Co, which advises funds owning stock in Tata Motors Ltd, is pushing India's largest automaker to list its Class A shares on the New York Stock Exchange to boost shareholder value. Tata said it had no plans to list these shares in New York presently.

Tata Motors' ordinary and Class A shares - which carry a 10th of the voting rights - are "materially undervalued" and worth atleast Rs 700 apiece, London-based Knight Assets said in a statement on Wednesday. They traded at Rs 445.8 and Rs 293, respectively, at 11:43 am in Mumbai.

Pavan Trivedi, chief financial officer of Tata Motors’ subsidiary, Tata Motors Finance, has quit. This follows four other senior exits from Tata Motors in less than two months. The exit comes weeks before the commercial launch of its compact sedan Zest and hatchback Bolt.

Ankush Arora, senior vice-president (commercial) passenger car business; S Jayaraman, assistant general manager, product planning; V Mamillapalle, head of purchases; and Rajesh Bagga, head of human resources (HR) and legal, were the recent resignations. Prabir Jha, head of HR, had quit last year.

MUMBAI: Automotive major Tata Motors is considering a sponsored American Depository Receipts (ADR) issue after large shareholders with differential voting rights (DVRs) sought an exit through the US bourses. At least two influential hedge funds and activist shareholders approached the Tata Group flagship citing that the DVRs quoted at a massive discount, not proportionate to the one-tenth voting rights it carried.

A lot is at stake for Tata Motors as far as two new launches from the carmaker, expected later this year, are concerned. The company is pinning its hopes on Zest — a new sedan — and Bolt — a new hatchback — to revive its flagging fortunes in the passenger car market. Pratap Bose, head of design at Tata Motors, speaks to Geeta Nair, and says that chairman Cyrus Mistry is personally reviewing the new cars being designed, and his involvement is reminiscent of Tata Sons’ previous chairman Ratan Tata’s passionate engagement with the launch of the Nano, the cheapest car in the world, produced by the company. Edited excerpts.

Markets have turned absolutely flat after making a marginally lower opening weighed down by global markets and financials.

By 9:30, the Sensex was lower by 2 points at 25,189 and the Nifty slipped by 3 points at 7,531 mark.

On the global front, Asian shares struck a cautious tone on Tuesday as the double-whammy of a deepening conflict in Iraq and a gas dispute between Ukraine and Russia sapped investors' appetite for risk.

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