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RBI seen keeping rates unchanged RBI may seek to wait and?watch amid?concerns of rising inflation The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is likely to keep interest rates on hold for a prolonged period starting with its policy meeting this week on concerns of rising inflation, economists surveyed by Mint said All 15 economists surveyed expect the central bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC) to keep the key repo rate—the rate at which it infuses liquidity in the banking system—unchanged at 6% when it announces its decision on Wednesday “We are expecting a prolonged pause at this point of time because inflation is expected to trend higher and crude oil prices have further increased the upside risk. Additionally, given the fact that the economy is seeing a cyclical recovery in growth, RBI would rather wait and watch on how these factors play out before moving rates in either direction,” said Upasna Bhardwaj, vice-president and senior economist at Kotak Mahindra Bank. Since the last

Sebi may consider exchanges’ foray into unrelated businesses A Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) panel headed by R Gandhi, former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India, will consider allowing Indian stock exchanges to enter into unrelated businesses, said two persons close to the development. At present, stock exchanges are allowed to provide only trading platform and promote clearing corporation and depositories. “Exchanges want more sources of income. Now, their revenue is from regulatory function such as listing fees etc.,” said one of the persons mentioned above.“Stock exchanges won’t be able to attract investments from investors if it’s not into other businesses. So, they want to carry out unrelated activity through subsidiaries.” On October 16, Sebi constituted a committee under Gandhi to review the norms for market infrastructure institutions such as stock exchanges, depositories and clearing corporations.Stock exchanges recently met the panel and soug

Retailers go to small towns for big growth In the September quarter, Kishore Biyaniled Future Retail opened its hypermarket Big Bazaar at Hajipur in Bihar, Puri in Odisha, and Raigarh in Chhattisgarh, taking the presence of its flagship stores to 130 cities across 26 states.Big Bazaar has also signed up properties for new stores in the remaining three states —Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland. A clear sign organised retailers are not only reaching tierII and tierIII towns but beyond is that Biyani has announced plans to have 10,000 smallformat neighbourhood stores across the nation in the next five years, up from 700 now. In FY18 itself, he plans to take the number of small format Easyday stores to 1,100. “We will open stores within 2 km of every consuming Indian,” Biyani said, unleashing his Retail 3.0 plans that aims to make the Future Group Asia´s largest integrated consumer business, with Rs 1 trillion in revenues, by 2047.The retail giant also has a consumer and logistics bu

Bombay HC liquidator starts auction process The process to sell the Sahara group´s Aamby Valley began on Friday with the official liquidator of the Bombay High Court (HC) inviting bids for the property.Last week, the Supreme Court (SC) asked the official liquidator of the Bombay HC to take over and manage Aamby Valley. It said the auction must begin on December 1 (Friday) and has to be completed within eight weeks.The HC liquidator came out with newspaper advertisements on the sale on Friday.An earlier attempt to auction the property had failed, as no bidder had come forward to bid for it In fact, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) told the Supreme Court that Sahara chief Subrata Roy and other directors of the company tried to obstruct the sale.The properties for sale comprise the 6,761.64acre township named ´Aamby Valley City Development´ in Lonavala in Pune district of Maharashtra and includes 1,409 acres surrounding the township and 321 acres in neighbouring S

Govt eases rules for auction of mineral blocks New mining rules to allow wider participation, ensure auctions are not called off for want of biddersIn an attempt to generate fresh interest from miners for auctions of mineral blocks, the government has amended the rules to allow wider participation and reduce the chances of auctions getting called off for want of bidders. A statement from the ministry of mines said on Friday that the Mineral Auction Rules were amended on Thursday, a move expected to enhance investor participation in future auctions.About 34 mineral blocks across six states have been chosen for auction by the end of the current fiscal year, the statement said. Poor investor interest due to subdued commodity prices and tighter rules led to the cancellation of about 60 auctions since 2015, when auctions replaced administrative allocation of mineral blocks.The National Democratic Alliance government had introduced auctions to remove the element of discretion in the

Working on linking e-wallets UPI National Payments Corp. of India (NPCI) is working to set up a framework for integrating non-bank mobile wallets with the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform. The process of integration will be completed in the next 2-3 months, said Dilip Asbe, the chief operating officer of NPCI, the umbrella organization for all retail payments in the country. As of now, non-bank mobile wallet users cannot make payments through UPI; they can only load their wallets through it. The Mint, New Delhi, 2nd December 2017

GST maze leaves exporters sulking for refunds In its 22nd meeting on October 6, the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council had asked the government to quickly refund to exporters the Integrated GST (IGST) paid on goods exported.Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced that refunds will start from October 10, for exports made in July, and from October 18, for exports made in August. However, most exporters have so far not received refund of the IGST paid in July or subsequent months.The Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC) issuedacircular on November 7, stating that refunds of the IGST paid on export goods cannot be made in many cases due to errors in export report/manifest (EGM), shipping bill and GSTR1 returns of outward supplies for July The CBEC said that common errors include incorrect shipping bill number in July GSTR1 (that can be corrected only through Table 9 of August GSTR1), mismatch of invoice number and IGST paid amount in the shipping bill and GSTR1, mismatch of