The United States reached its latest heartbreaking pandemic milestone Friday, eclipsing 700,000 deaths from COVID-19 just as the surge from the delta variant is starting to slow down and give overwhelmed hospitals some relief.

It took 3 months for the U.S. to go from 600,000 to 700,000 deaths, driven by the variant's rampant spread through unvaccinated Americans. The death toll is larger than the population of Boston.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday paid tributes to Mahatma Gandhi on his 152nd birth anniversary, saying his life and ideas will inspire every generation to walk the path of their duties.

I bow to respected Bapu on Gandhi Jayanti. His noble principles are globally relevant and give strength to millions, he added.

Shares of Tata Power Company continued to climb higher, hitting a new high at Rs 165 after 13 years, up 4 per cent on the BSE in Friday’s intra-day trade, on improved outlook. The stock of Tata Group electric utilities company was trading higher for the fourth straight day and has rallied 19 per cent during the period. The previous record high was Rs 158 recorded on January 4, 2008.

In the process, Tata Power’s market capitalisation (market-cap) has crossed Rs 50,000 crore mark.

The Centre has approved release of the second installment of its share of the State Disaster Response Fund (SDRF) amounting to Rs 7,274.40 crore, in advance, to 23 states.

The decision has been taken by Union Home Minister Amit Shah as part of the Modi government's initiative to facilitate state governments to have enough funds in their SDRF to deal with any emergency arising out of any disaster.

Shares of Delta Corp hit an over three-year high of Rs 287.70 after they rallied 9 per cent on the National Stock Exchange (NSE) in the intra-day trade on Friday. The stock has been included in the derivatives segment with effect from today. In the past one month, it has zoomed 52 per cent as compared to a 2.3 per cent rise in the Nifty50 index.

At 10:10 am, Delta Corp was trading 7.5 per cent higher at Rs 283 on the NSE, as against a 0.05 per cent decline in the benchmark index.

Shares of oil exploration & production (E&P) companies continued their north-bound journey, gaining by up to 3 per cent on the BSE in Friday’s intra-day trade in an otherwise weak market on the back of 62 per cent hike in domestic natural gas prices.

The price of domestic-produced natural gas has been hiked to $2.9 per million British thermal units (mBtu) for the October 2021-March 2022 period on Thursday. The ceiling price of natural gas produced from deepwater, ultra-deepwater, and high pressure-high temperature (collectively called difficult) discoveries has also been hiked to $6.13 per mBtu.

The Indian rupee declined 12 paise to 74.35 against the US dollar in opening trade on Friday, tracking strength of the American currency in the overseas market and a muted trend in domestic equities.

At the interbank foreign exchange, the rupee opened at 74.33 against the dollar, then fell further to 74.35, registering a fall of 12 paise over its previous close.

The National Payments Corporation of India’s (NPCI) flagship payment platform, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), logged 3.65 billion transactions worth Rs 6.5 trillion in September, an all-time high, both in volume and value terms. It was also the third straight month with more than 3 billion transactions on the platform, signaling the wider digital payment adoption in the country since the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic hit.

On a month-on-month (MoM) basis, UPI’s volume of transactions was up 3 per cent, and the value of transactions was up 2.35 per cent.

Hyundai Motor India Ltd (HMIL) on Friday reported 23.6 per cent decline in total sales at 45,791 units in September.

The company had sold 59,913 units in the same month last year, HMIL said in a statement.

Domestic sales were down 34.2 per cent to 33,087 units as against 50,313 units in September 2020, the company added.

Taking a confrontation stand against its largest shareholder, the Zee board on Friday rejected its demand to hold an extraordinary general meeting to remove current MD and CEO, Punit Goenka and induct its nominees.

In a statement to the stock exchanges, Zee said its board deliberated and discussed various legal and statutory implications of the requisition notice.

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