Come March and the century-old system of delivery of teas to buyers on credit at auctions will give way to what is known as a cash-n-carry system, where deliveries will be made only after the auctioneer gets his cheque.

Even as discontent brews over the new buy and sell system, hundreds of tea buyers lifting almost 400 million kg of tea will have to shed their habit of working on a credit line. The move was prompted largely by the recent default of payments to tea sellers by Carritt Moran, one of the leading tea auctioneers in India.

KEC International, one of the largest Power Transmission EPC companies in the world, has secured two orders worth Rs 227 crore from Power Grid Corporation for supplying power transmission equipment.

In a disclosure to the Bombay Stock Exchange, the maker of power equipment said that it has received two 765 kV S/c projects in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra and in Punjab and Haryana from PGCIL.

State firm in talks with Huawei, ZTE after govt writes off Rs 2,820 cr in losses

Indian Telephone Industries (ITI) Ltd, the state-owned telecom equipment manufacturer, is talking to foreign firms such as Huawei and ZTE for joint ventures in manufacturing advanced telecom equipment, sources said.

The loss-making public sector unit will float a tender inviting quotations from telecom equipment manufacturers within a month.

ITI is seeking partnerships in three new product categories —Wireless Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) equipment, optical transmission and switching equipment, and IP core network systems.

State-run National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC) on February 26 paid an interim dividend worth Rs 4.01 billion to the administration.

After getting the cheque from the NMDC chairman, Mr. Ram Vilas Paswan, Union Minister for Steel, Chemicals and Fertilizers, praised the company (NMDC) for its excellent performance.

Mr. Paswan stated that NDMC’s 4 million ton steel plant in Chhattisgarh would come sooner than schedule.

For quite some time now, domestic steelmakers have been lobbying for an increase in import duty to 15% from 5% now, claiming that it would protect the Indian market from cheap imports from CIS countries, mainly China, Russia and Ukraine.

But analysts see any such hike in duty as an opportunity for domestic steelmakers to increase prices by at least 10%.

Development fee to be levied at Kolkata, Chennai, Goa, Thiruvananthapuram and Ahmedabad airports run by AAI

Get ready to pay a fee to use even those airports which are under the aegis of Airport Authority of India (AAI).

Civil aviation minister Praful Patel said on Thursday a development fee will be levied at Kolkata, Chennai, Goa, Thiruvananthapuram and Ahmedabad airports. Till now, such a fee had been levied at airports developed through the public-private partnership model — Bangalore, Hyderabad and Delhi — but the ministry was hesitant in charging fliers for development of AAI-owned airports. AAI is a state-run company tasked with development and maintenance of civil airports.