The export duty hikes and tax cuts will likely hurt economic growth and raise the chances of the fiscal deficit widening, but do little to bring down retail prices within the central bank's tolerance level, economists and industry officials said.
The decline in work generation corroborates with the decline in demand for work under the rural guarantee scheme, which has witnessed a year-on-year dip and is inching closer to the pre-Covid levels, suggesting reduced dependence on the rural employment guarantee scheme for livelihood.
The government is likely to stick to its fiscal deficit target as specified in the budget and there may not necessarily be a need for increasing government borrowing just yet, governor Shaktikanta Das told CNBC-TV18 in an interview on Monday.
Paytm Payments Bank, which facilitates transactions on mobile commerce platform Paytm, expects the central bank to allow it to resume taking on new customers in the next few months, a top executive told Reuters.
The increase in export taxes on iron ore, announced by the government over the weekend, will lead to large surpluses at home, and mainly hit producers of low grade ores that depend on overseas markets, a mining industry body said on Monday.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son met on Monday to discuss more investments by the country's biggest tech backer, as a startup boom appears to cool in India amid worries about the global economy.
Retail inflation hardened to an eight-year high of 7.79% in April. In a surprise move, the Reserve Bank of India raised the policy repo rate by 0.4 percentage point (40 basis points) to 4.4% earlier this month. The central bank's monetary policy committee (MPC) had also suggested a cut in fuel taxes to dampen inflationary pressures.
