On the eve of entering its 145th year of service, Kolkata-based Allahabad Bank, has made announcement about the retail selling of gold coins publicly.

The public sector lender said that it will shortly launch the scheme in other areas.

While speaking to media persons, Mr. KR Kamath, Allahabad Bank Chairman & Managing Director, stated that at first, the coins will be available in denominations of four (4), eight (8) and ten (10) grams in select core banking solutions branches of the bank.

In a latest development, India's largest utility NTPC has informed that it would start coal production from its mines in Jharkhand in the second half of this fiscal.

The company plans to achieve a coal production target of 15 million tonnes per annum by 2012.

It should be noted that NTPC has ventured into the coal mining business with an aim to meet about 20 per cent of its fuel requirement from its captive mines by 2017.

Chennai-based Polaris Software Lab, a financial technology company, has plans to expand its operation to 40 countries over the next five years.

In addition, the company, in order to strengthen its insurance portfolio business has decided to set up a centre of excellence for insurance near Chennai, with an investment of around Rs 100 crore to develop new solutions and to service company’s insurance clients.

BT India, the Indian subsidiary of BT group, which is one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services, has announced the opening of its first ever BT Asia Pacific Security Operations centre (SOC) in India.  

The centre which is located in a BT dedicated building at Noida, will provide security device management services involving critical customer components including firewalls, intrusion detection devices and Bluecoat Proxy devices used for securing networked-IT environments.

ABB, a leader in power and automation technologies, has signed a frame agreement with BMW Group to support the carmaker’s operations in Germany, the U.K. and the U.S.

Under the arrangement, ABB will supply 2,100 industrial robots over five years, beginning 2010 and commission a variety of robot models for BMW, including the IRB 6640, 6620, 7600 and the new mid range robot IRB 4600; a compact, light-weight industrial robot with the longest vertical reach in its class.

In a latest development, State Bank of India, the country’s largest lender, has decided to extend the special offer for auto and home loans by five months till September, this year.

According to banking officials, the move was taken to benefit those peoples, who felt the April deadline was insufficient for availing of the scheme.