It has been three quarters since the knuckle rap from the Reserve Bank of India on asset quality and ICICI Bank Ltd’s grip on its bad loans is still slippery. The largest private sector lender reported a 17% increase in its gross non-performing assets (NPAs) for the December quarter and the bad loan ratios worsened, partly due to decelerating credit growth.

ICICI Bank’s gross NPA ratio jumped 1.09 percentage points sequentially to 7.91% for the quarter ended December while net NPA ratio rose to 4.35%.

The board of Infosys Ltd has inducted director D.N. Prahlad into the nomination and remuneration committee (NRC) that oversees the nomination process and the incentives and pay offered to its senior-most executives, including the chief executive.

Prahlad, a relative of Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy, will now be one of the five members of the current NRC, according to two executives familiar with the development; the decision may make it more difficult for the management to award higher salaries to its senior executives.

Private sector Kotak Mahindra Bank today said the RBI has asked it to bring down its promoter shareholding by half to 15 per cent in a phased manner by March 31, 2020.

“The Bank has received a communication from the Reserve Bank of India to bring down its promoter shareholding to 30 per cent by June 30, 2017, 20 per cent by December 31, 2018 and 15 per cent by March 31, 2020,” Kotak Mahindra Bank said in a BSE filing.

Zee Digital Convergence’s live TV platform, dittoTV today said it has partnered with Idea Cellular for its flagship entertainment app Idea Movie Club to offer telecom operator’s subscribers access to a bouquet of over 90 live TV channels. “Through the partnership, Idea Cellular, the country’s third largest telecom operator, offers its subscribers a subscription of dittoTV bundled with its data recharges and Movie Club packs,” it said in a statement.

Indian benchmark indices opened on a cautious note ahead of the Union Budget 2016-17 due later today, waiting to watch the proposals which would set the course of the markets in the coming days.

BSE Sensex was trading up 0.12% at 27,689.77 points, and NSE Nifty was up 0.16% at 8,575 points, with most sectoral indices recording mild gains.

Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his budget for 2017-18 on Wednesday announced central travel system for defence personnel.

Jaitley said the money allocated for defence expenditure, excluding pension expenditure, is Rs. 2,74,114 crores, adding this would include Rs. 86,488 crore of capital expenditure.

The country's largest car maker Maruti Suzuki India (MSI) on Wednesday reported a 27.1 per cent increase in total sales at 1,44,396 units in January as against 1,13,606 in the year-ago period.

The company's domestic sales stood at 1,33,934 units, up 25.9 per cent from 1,06,383 in January last year, MSI said in a statement.

State run Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Ltd (ONGC)'s standalone net profit rose almost three-fold in the December 2016 ended quarter, but missed street estimates. The year-on-year jump in profit came against a high exceptional cost item reported in the comparative quarter of the last financial year.

The Company has posted a net profit of Rs 4,352.33 crore against Rs 1,465.88 crore in the same period a year ago. In the October-December 2015 quarter, the company had a reported an exceptional cost item of Rs 3,616.41 crore against no exceptional cost reported in the same quarter in 2016.

In a strategy that may work in tandem with the Look East policy of India, state-run Indian Oil Corporation is set to foray into retail, pipeline and refinery sectors in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Vietnam and Nepal.

While the company is looking to enter into Bangladesh and Myanmar in segments like fuel retail and LPG marketing, in Vietnam, the focus would be on refining opportunities. “We have already submitted bids for fuel trade in Myanmar.

Mumbai: There were signs of anxiety in the market as the Sensex on Tuesday slumped 194 points ahead of the budget—to be presented on Wednesday—to a one-week low of 27,656 and the Nifty slipped below 8,600 after the Economic Survey projected a lower growth of 6.5% for 2016-17.

The recently introduced immigration restrictions by US President Donald trump and the new legislation that aims to rework the H1-B visa programme dealt a blow to IT stocks, which saw a big fall. TCS, Wipro and Infosys dropped by up to 4.47%, dragging down the BSE IT index by 2.96%, followed by technology that tanked 2.49%.

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