New Delhi: The empowered group of ministers (eGoM) on special economic zones (SEZs) has given a clean chit to Essar's steel SEZ in Hazira and Adani's port SEZ in Mundra.

Speaking on this, a government official said, “The EGoM has taken a stand favouring the SEZs. The zones will not have to be de-notified.”

With this, the total land area for the combined SEZ has increased to more than 5,000 hectares, which is more than the present land ceiling. However, the eGoM made it very clear that the port SEZ would not be eligible for tax sops for the area falling inside the port, which is an old construction.

As part of its pan India launch, one of the country’s leading direct-to-home (DTH) service provider, Sun Direct Pvt Ltd, launched its services in Delhi and the national capital region (NCR). With a current subscriber base of 1.5 million, the DTH company targets to reach 3-million subscriber base by the end of this year.

Largely based in the southern states, the company had launched its services in Gujarat, Rajasthan, HP, Punjab and Haryana in September 2008.
For a basic package of 130 channels, the company charges Rs 1,999 towards 10 months of subscription fee and installation charges. Besides this, the company also provides add-on packages to its customers which are charged at Rs 10 to Rs 115 per month.

Reliance Communications, the nation’s largest integrated telecom service provider has come up with a lucrative option to woo its customers. The company tends to offer free notebooks together with the internet facility as it has entered into partnership with the five main computer hardware companies Intel Corp, Acer, Asus, HCL Infosystems and Lenovo.

As per the company, the scheme offers laptops which entail Intel’s ‘Atom’ and a high speed internet data card service of Reliance. The Acer Aspire Notebook will carry a 24 months free unlimited data download as an offer on purchase of Reliance data card enabled net connections across India. The prospective buyers would have to pay a monthly instalment of Rs. 1,500 for a two year duration period.

New Delhi: It’s certainly not a good news for those who wanted to purchase Maruti this Diwali. India’s largest carmaker Maruti Suzuki has announced an increase in prices of its selected models by upto Rs 6,000 just ahead of Diwali. The price hike on select models would range between Rs 2,000 and Rs 6,000.

In a press release, the company said, “'The company has announced a marginal price hike of between 0.7 per cent to 1.1 per cent (between Rs 2000 to Rs 60000) in the ex-showroom prices of its cars.”

The price of the entry model ‘800cc’car have been hiked by Rs 2,000, while ‘Alto’ will cost Rs 2,500 more.

Negotiations for the potential sale or merger of Chrysler LLC withstanding, the automaker announced Friday that it will cut 25 percent of its white-collared work force – that is, 5,000 jobs - to deal with a continued downward spiral in US auto sales.

The announcement of the cut is a blow for Detroit, as it implies that Chrysler, which has about 18,500 white-collar workers, will remove about 5,000 salaried workers and employees who work for other companies under contract with the automaker.

Hurt by the recession fears, Parsvnath Developers, one of the leading real estate company has revealed that it would sack under-performing employees as part of its cost cutting measures that would begin in the next 15-20 days. 

The company however, did not specify the number of people who will be retrenched. The company currently employs 1,400 people and about 30,000 people are indirectly employed.