Indian newspaper highlights -sept15,2009

Highlights of today's newspapers:

THE ECONOMIC TIMES

- The Intelligence Bureau has asked the communication ministry to block all internet telephony (VoIP) services to and from the country until the Department of Telecom (DoT) puts in place a mechanism to track such calls.

- After dominating the Indian market with its indigenously-built SUV Scorpio, Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) is working on one of its most ambitious projects - building an all-new SUV from scratch with an eye on foreign markets. M&M will invest Rs 7-8 billion in the new product that is expected to be out before the next fiscal-end.

BUSINESS STANDARD FIRMS

- Companies are seeing the cost of buying health insurance for their employees more than double, with insurers increasing the premium on group covers to partly cover mounting losses after they lost the option of cross-subsidising it with more lucrative property covers.

- Key changes are expected in vehicle repossession norms to ease the process for banks to take back cars and two-wheelers from owners that default on loan repayments.These changes are being discussed by leading private and government-owned banks through the Indian Banking Association, the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers and the Reserve Bank of India.

THE FINANCIAL EXPRESS

- The finance ministry has dropped its plans to amend or replace the Fiscal Responsibility & Budgetary Management (FRBM) Act of 2004, which laid down fiscal and revenue deficit targets until 2008-09.

- Railway stations across the country are set to get a facelift with the railway ministry set to begin work on multi-functional stations and also carry forward the earlier plans of world class stations. These are some of the recommendations in the first report of the expert committee on railways led by Amit Mitra, which was submitted to railway minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday. The minister assured that these will be acted upon and said, Rail Board will take care of their implementation.

THE HINDU BUSINESS LIN

- The Fertiliser Ministry is seeking a uniform price for natural gas delivered to urea plants across the country.

- From oils that protect your heart by reducing bad cholesterol to juices that fix your iron intake or curd that lines your stomach with good bacteria the marketplace is flooded with nutraceutical or functional products. But consumers are not quite biting into the health hard-sell, say food and pharmaceutical industry representatives. The credibility of unsubstantiated claims stands in the way of the nutraceutical industry tapping the market potential.

HINDUSTAN TIMES

- With an uncertain demand situation in the real estate industry, pricing practices are taking a novel turn. DLF, the country's largest real estate company, is adopting a pricing model that resembles book-building in initial public offers (IPOs) of shares, using a process to test the market while pricing. Only the style is informal unlike in shares, in which a price band is set and formal offers are invited.

THE TIMES OF INDIA

- Following the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the global meltdown, pharmaceuticals is perhaps the only sector globally which withstood it all, announcing a slew of deals month after month. The biggest merger and acquisition (M&A) announced till date is also from the pharma space Pfizer's $68 billion buy-out of Wyeth in January 2009 at a time when the financial world was crumbling and global deals had plummeted to a naught.