MUMBAI: Maruti Suzuki and Hyundai Motor India plan to increase car prices by Rs 2,500 to Rs 1 lakh in January, as they seek to offset a dent on margin from higher raw material cost, steep discounts in the past few months and a weakened rupee that made imported parts more expensive.

Several other automakers have already announced price hikes and the rest are expected to do so soon, following in the footsteps of the market's top two.

Mumbai: Stocks signed off 2016 on a cheerful note, with the Sensex surging over 260 points on Friday to close at over a fresh two-week high of 26,626 on the final trading session of the year, amid positive Asian cues. The beginning of January 2017 series of futures and options made investors upbeat.

With the deadline for depositing banned notes ending today and ahead of the approaching Union budget, investors accelerated buying activity with hopes that the government might come up with a series of steps to boost the economy.

Microsoft is working on a new version of its Surface Pro tablet which is set to arrive in the first quarter of 2017.

The new Surface Pro 5 2-in-1 will sport an ultra-HD display and magnetic charging stylus, with Pegatron Technology that will manufacture the device, DigiTimes reported on Friday citing a Chinese-language Economic Daily News report.

On the last day of the deadline to deposit demonetised notes, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared the launch of a biometric payment system using the Aadhaar platform within the next two weeks and called upon citizens to adopt digital currency in a big way from the New Year, reports fe Bureau in New Delhi. With the call that “Your thumb is your bank now”, the PM said payments through the mobile app called BHIM (Bharat Interface for Money) can be effected after the bank account is linked with the Aadhaar gateway. He was speaking at a DigiDhan Mela, organised to celebrate the success of the country’s push for digital currency.

The civil aviation ministry is satisfied with the performance of Air India with respect to its 2012 turnaround plan for which the government pumped in R30,000 crore into the loss-making airline, and expects it to post an operating profit this financial year also, secretary RN Choubey told FE.

He said since the carrier’s plan is on track, the ministry expects it to post a net profit in FY19 ahead of the target of 2020-21 stipulated in the turnaround plan. Choubey’s assertion that the state-owned carrier will post an operating profit in FY17 is significant since the airline posted an operating loss during the first two quarters of the current fiscal.

Stock market got off to a positive start in the final trading session of 2016, with the benchmark Sensex surging 211 points to 26,577 on widespread gains amid further strength in the rupee.

In addition, the beginning of January series in the futures and options (F&O) space accelerated buying by participants, which supported the upside.

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the decision to scrap high-value bank notes will give the economy a further boost, and would provide long-term benefits, including forcing the country's vast shadow economy into the open.

The defence of his radical move to abolish 500 and 1,000 rupee notes, in an interview to a magazine released on Thursday, comes after the decision has disrupted the daily lives of hundreds of millions of Indians as banks have struggled to swiftly expand the circulation of new bills.

The supply of coal to the power sector by the state–owned CIL saw a fall of 6 per cent at 33.7 million tonnes last month even as the government claimed in October that the demand for the fossil fuel has started picking up.

The despatch of dry fuel by Coal India Ltd (CIL) to the power sector in November last year stood at 35.9 million tonnes (MT), according to government data.

In a move to widen the ambit of the domestic capital markets, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Thursday issued guidelines for the introduction of trading in interest rate options, effective January 31, 2017. While options trading has been in place in the equity market and was introduced in the commodities market in September, derivative trading with interest rates as the underlying has been limited to futures so far.

1.5 core LPG connections have been issued to the Below Poverty Line (BPL) households under the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) scheme, the petroleum ministry said on Thursday.

The PMUY is an ambitious social welfare scheme launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on May 1 2016 from Ballia district in Uttar Pradesh. According to the official release, the target fixed for the current financial year under the scheme has been achieved within a span of less than eight months.

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