MUMBAI: Mahindra & Mahindra expects automobile sales to revive in the upcoming festival season as consumption demand in Asia’s third-biggest economy remains strong, paced by broader growth and increasing aspirations.

“…Demand and consumption are good stories for the country and there is no reason to have that derailed. A little inflation is like good cholesterol,” VS Parthasarathy, group CFO at Mahindra & Mahindra, said on Wednesday.

The BSE benchmark Sensex crashed over 1000 points while Nifty too reached below 10,200 amid global sell off. At 9:56 AM, Sensex was trading below 823.36 (2.37%) at 33,928.65 while Nifty50 was down by 271.80 (2.60%) at 10,190.85. Around 175 stocks have hit fresh 52-week lows at this point on the BSE. Some of the names include Bank of Baroda, Bharti Airtel, Bombay Dyeing, Central Bank of India, Deepak Fertilisers, Finolex Industries, HAL, HUDCO, Indostar and Nilkamal, among others.

The world’s largest consumer goods company Procter & Gamble (P&G) on Wednesday said that it was setting up an innovation sourcing fund in India in a move aimed at identifying start-ups and organisations that had industry-leading ideas and solutions.

While P&G did not specify the size of the fund, simply saying that it ran into “multi-million dollars”, the Cincinnati-based company follows its Anglo-Dutch rival Unilever

As demand from the telecom segment shrinks, with rising competition eating into voice rates in a big way, IBM India is preparing to tap new revenue avenues from this segment as telecom companies eye enterprises and data space in a big way.

Telecom continues to be the largest division for IBM in India, with clients such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone. The second largest business generating segment for the company is financial services.

The Congress on Wednesday said that Union minister M J Akbar must either offer a satisfactory explanation on the allegations of sexual harassment against him or resign immediately.

The party also demanded an inquiry into his conduct.

As the #MeToo campaign gathered momentum in India, some women journalists have come out and accused Akbar, a former editor and now the minister of state for external affairs, of sexually harassing them during his stint as a journalist.

To groom professional political leadership in the country, the Yogi Adityanath government on Wednesday announced that it will set up a Political Training Institute in the National Capital Region (NCR).

The institute is proposed to be set up over an area of almost 10 acres in Ghaziabad at a cost of nearly Rs 2 billion.

Shares of YES Bank, Dewan Housing Finance Corporation, Goa Carbon, Philips Carbon Black and Infibeam Avenues have rallied more than 40% from their respective 52-week lows.

YES Bank was up 5% to Rs 237 in intra-day trade, extending its past two days 9% gain on the BSE, after the board of private sector lender inducted TS Vijayan, former chairman of Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) and Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC), and OP Bhatt, former CMD of State Bank of India (SBI), as external experts in the committee.

Tata Motors Wednesday launched an updated version of its compact sedan Tigor, priced between Rs 520,000 and Rs 738,000 (ex-showroom).

The petrol variants of the model are priced between Rs 520,000 and Rs 665,000, while the diesel trims are tagged between Rs 609,000 and Rs 738,000.

Shares of IT companies slipped in the intraday trade on Wednesday as the rupee recovered from all-time lows.

At 12:13 am, shares of TCS were trading two per cent lower at Rs 2,050 a piece on BSE. The stock dropped as much as 2.87 per cent to Rs 2,030 during the trade. On similar lines, Infosys was down over two and a half per cent at Rs 698.75. HCL Tech was trading at Rs 1,045.50, down 2 per cent.

The Supreme Court Wednesday asked the Centre to provide details of the decision making process in the Rafale fighter jet deal with France in a sealed cover but clarified that it does not want information on pricing and technical particulars.

The bench, comprising Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justices S K Kaul and K M Joseph, also made it clear that it was not taking into account the allegations on corruption in the deal made in the petitions.

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