New Delhi, Aug. 8: India looks set to reboot its military ties with the US starting with the Prime Minister’s scheduled Washington trip in September after the defence ministers today decided to renew an overarching pact and appointed executives to oversee defence technology ventures.

“The Prime Minister underlined the importance of defence relations in the overall strategic partnership between the two countries and indicated his desire to see further progress in defence relations, including in defence manufacturing in India, technology transfer in the area of defence, exercises and higher studies in the field of defence,” the Prime Minister’s Office said after US secretary of defence Chuck Hagel met Narendra Modi here this morning.

President Barack Obama spoke in favor of net neutrality this week, pushing back against the idea of paid prioritization, which many call Internet “fast lanes.” Following the president’s comments, a number of technology companies joined cultural and privacy groups in praising the American leader.

The corporations and organizations penned a letter citing the president’s comments directly, and saying that in the wake of his remarks that they are “counting on [the president] to take action to ensure equality on the Internet.”

New Delhi: The ministry of road transport and highways has decided to constitute an inter-ministerial committee to review the note prepared by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) seeking an overhaul of the existing model concession agreement to revive private sector interest in the road sector, said two government officials who did not want to be named.

The model concession agreement is the contract that sets the terms of execution of a project and is signed between the concessionaire and the government, in this case the NHAI.

In order to protect its own servers and customers in a better way, Facebook has acquired California-based cybersecurity startup PrivateCore for an undisclosed amount. The other terms and conditions are still undisclosed. Post this acquisition, “Facebook plans to deploy our technology into the Facebook stack to help protect the people who use Facebook.” said PrivateCore’s CEO Oded Horovitz, on the company website. “Working together with Facebook, there is a huge opportunity to pursue our joint vision at scale with incredible impact.”

Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said the prime reason for the decline of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) was inadequate investment in infrastructure expansion in recent years.

The other two reasons for BSNL slipping into the red, according to him, were high employee cost and poor perception of quality of service provided.

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has imposed a fine of Rs 13 crore on Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) for violation of the listing agreement with regard to disclosure of a financial metric. Sebi on Friday charged the company with violating section 41 of the listing agreement and section 21 of the Securities Contract Regulations Act (SCRA).

The violations date back to 2007-09, when RIL had issued 120 million warrants to entities in the promoter group on a preferential basis.

Priyanka Gandhi on Friday dismissed media speculation over her assuming an important post in the Congress as mere “conjecture” and “baseless rumours”.

In a rare impromptu statement, Priyanka noted how “at opportune moments” such conjecture was always raked up.

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) on Friday released a discussion paper on higher disclosure standards pertaining to public offer and listing of securitised debt instruments (SDI). Sebi, in the paper, has highlighted the role and responsibilities of trustees of SDI. It has proposed a trustee needs to have a net worth of at least Rs 2 crore. The duty of calling for periodic reports from sellers and ensuring the investors of SDI have been allotted debt would lie with the trustee of SDI.

After witnessing decline in profit for six consecutive quarters, State Bank of India (SBI), the country’s largest lender, reported 3.3 per cent net profit growth to Rs 3,349 crore for the quarter ended June, compared to Rs 3,241 crore in the corresponding period of last year.

Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairman, SBI, said: “Pressure (on asset quality) appears to be subsiding. But we need to see a pick-up in the economy to see appreciable changes in asset quality.”

Weighed by a fall in the demand for utility vehicles (UV), Mumbai-based Mahindra & Mahindra posted six per cent dip in its stand-alone net profit to Rs 882 crore for the quarter ended June even as demand for passenger vehicles looked to pick pace again.

It beat street expectations which had pegged the net profit at Rs 833 crore for the quarter. During the quarter last year it had posted net profit of Rs 938 crore. The profit would have been higher, but for the Rs 67 crore (or 37 per cent) jump in the depreciation to Rs 248 crore. Stand-alone revenues were up two per cent year-on-year to Rs 10,096 crore in the quarter.

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