Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Monday took stock of the finances of public sector banks as also the resolution of bad loans or NPAs, with heads of the lenders.

Besides NPA resolution and bank finances, the meeting also featured the government’s financial inclusion schemes.

High demand for electronics could outpace domestic production, leading to an import requirement of about $300 billion by 2020, a report by Assocham-NEC today said. The report pointed out that while demand for electronic products in India is expected to grow at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 41 per cent to reach $400 billion by 2020, domestic production is growing at a CAGR of 27 per cent. This leaves a huge gap for import to the extent of $300 billion, the joint study said.

After Vodafone India came out with Ramzan special plans for its customers, now rival network provider Idea Cellular has also brought new offers to the table. Idea, which had announced a merger with Vodafone, is offering its subscribers 79GB of data for Rs 396. The 70GB free data that Idea Cellular is offering, is for its 3G users for a period of 70 days. Additionally, the company is also offering free local and STD Idea to Idea calling, with a limit of 300 minutes per day and 1,200 minutes per week. After the daily or weekly limit is exhausted by the user, they will be charged at 30 paise per minute.

Retirement fund body EPFO will park about Rs 22,500 crore in the exchange traded funds this fiscal following the approval of its trustees to enhance investments in equity or equity-linked schemes last month, a senior official has said. Last month, the Employees Provident Fund Organisation’s (EPFO) apex decision-making body had approved the proposal to increase the investments in exchange traded funds from 10 per cent to 15 per cent of the investable deposits. “The EPFO had invested Rs 1.5 lakh crore 2016-17.

The Sensex picked up cues from a lacklustre Asia as it stumbled 156 points in the beginning of the week after investors started to take profit ahead of key IIP and inflation numbers due later in the day.

Asian shares traded in the negative territory after polls in the UK threw up a hung Parliament and markets await the results of the first round of France's parliamentary elections.

The country's largest lender, the State Bank of India (SBI), has expressed apprehensions that demonetisation may continue to result in slowing down of the economy and adversely affect its business.

The government had discontinued Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 banknotes from November 9, 2016, and issued new Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 currency notes in exchange for the discontinued ones.

The country’s top car maker, Maruti Suzuki, is now bigger than the rest of the industry put together for the first time in over a decade. In the first two months (April & May) of the current financial year (FY17-18), the company sold 274,329 passenger vehicles (cars, vans and utility vehicles) in the domestic market, about 19,300 more than the 254,930 units sold by the rest of the industry players put together. Maruti clocked a volume growth of over 19 per cent in these two months, much higher than the industry’s growth of 12 per cent.

After a slow start, export of cars from Ford India’s factory at Sanand, close to this city, expanded during 2016-17. The facility produced 78,930 cars for export, at par with the shipment abroad from its Chennai factory.

Sanand makes Ford’s hatchback, the Figo, and the Figo Aspire sedan. Sale of the Figo had fallen by almost 60 per cent in the latter half of 2015-16 (October to March). Those of the Aspire fell 74 per cent between August 2015, when it was launched, and March 2016.

State-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) is keen to acquire India's third-biggest fuel retailer HPCL in a Rs 42,254 crore deal after finding Bharat Petroleum Corp Ltd (BPCL) too expensive to buy.

Following up on Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's Budget announcement of creating an integrated oil company, ONGC evaluated options of acquiring either Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd (HPCL) or BPCL - the two downstream oil refining and fuel marketing companies.

Nearly seven lakh farmers who have availed crop loan through cooperative banks in Rajasthan will get an insurance cover of Rs 6 lakh by giving only Rs 27 as yearly premium.

Rajasthan government has raised the insurance amount by one lakh in the present fiscal year in the "Raj Sahakar personal accident insurance scheme" , targeted to cover more than 25 lakh farmers, a state minister said.

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