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A piece of good news for the bank employees as the Indian Banks’ Association (IBA) has recently announced the revised dearness allowance (DA) rate for various bank employees for February, March and April 2026.  Revised Dearness Allowance Rates  Moving ahead, IBA has also announced the revised and dearness relief (DR) for pensioners for February to July 2026. Dearness Allowance for Workmen and Officer Employees in banks for February, March and April 2026 under XII BPS/9TH Joint Note dated 08.03.2024 The DA rate will be 25% for the months of August, September and October 2025 which is almost 4% higher than the dearness allowance rates. in a circular dated February 2, 2026, IBA noted, “…the rate of Dearness Allowance payable to Workmen and Officer employees for the months of February, March and April 2026 shall be 25% of `pay’ (0.01% change in DA on ‘pay’ for change in every second decimal place of CPI 2016 over 123.03 points),” IBA said. This is primarily based on the Consumer Price Index for October, November and December 2025. According to IBA, “the average CPI of the above is 148.03 and accordingly the number of points over 123.03 are 25.00 (148.03 – 123.03). The last…  ​Read MoreBusiness Archives - Trak.in - Indian Business of Tech, Mobile & Startups

Bengaluru-based startup Sarvam AI has introduced two new large language models, as it expands its role in India’s effort to build domestic AI systems.Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit in Delhi, Sarvam AI Co-founder Pratyush Kumar said the company has trained a 30-billion-parameter model and a 105-billion-parameter model from scratch, using a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to balance scale and efficiency.The MoE architecture boosts efficiency by activating only a subset of the total parameters for each input, rather than the whole model.Kumar said Sarvam had previously developed a 3-billion-parameter dense model but it had to scale further. The 30B model, he explained, activates only 1 billion parameters per token despite having 30 billion parameters in total. He said this reduces inference costs and improves efficiency, particularly for reasoning tasks. The model supports a 32,000-token context window and was trained on 16 trillion tokens.Efficiency, Kumar said, is central to the company’s approach as it aims to build AI that delivers population-scale impact. Sarvam also presented a 105-billion-parameter MoE model that activates 9 billion parameters and supports a 128,000-token context window. Kumar said the system is designed for more complex reasoning and agentic use cases. Kumar said, on most benchmarks, the 105B…  ​Read More​YourStory RSS Feed

India’s water purifier and bottled water market is projected to reach $7.72 Bn (2032) and $14.97 Bn (2031), respectively. Unsurprisingly,…

Consumers today are concerned about the safety and sustainability of their kitchenware. Many are trying to reduce their exposure to…

Indian LLMs Steal The Show It was an action-packed third day at the India AI Impact Summit. As usual, big…

Hello,Day 3 of the AI summit was all about capital.Big Tech took centre stage, with Microsoft unveiling its plans to invest $50 billion by the end of the decade to help bring AI to countries across the Global South to close the gap with the more advanced Global North. Meanwhile, India’s AI ecosystem received a significant boost from Yotta Data Services’ plans to spend $2 billion on NVIDIA's latest chips for an India-based AI computing hub. Qualcomm, too, was quick to jump into the fray with a commitment of an additional $150 million to an AI venture fund to support Indian tech startups.According to NVIDIA’s Managing Director for South Asia, Vishal Dhupar, India’s vast base of developers, startups, and partners has helped it cement itself as “one of the most important hubs for AI innovation”.To that end, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai met at the summit to discuss India’s AI push and the role Google could play in accelerating its ambitions.India’s homegrown AI startups also made a splash, with Sarvam AI unveiling a new generation of large language models, in line with India’s insistence on reducing reliance on global AI services and building models tailored for local languages…  ​Read More​YourStory RSS Feed

Online travel agencies dominate how Indians plan and book their journeys today. These platforms account for over 80% of the country’s online travel market, a scale built on speed, reach and relentless price comparison. Discounts became the default lever as mobile-first travellers learned to compare multiple options within seconds. That approach worked for volume, but scale changes expectations. Travellers still watch prices closely, but they are becoming less impressed by repeated markdowns. Their attention is now shifting to whether the price shown can be trusted to reflect fairness and clarity. A low number on the screen means little if it creates doubt later. Price sensitivity is, therefore, taking on a different meaning. It is becoming more discerning. The focus is turning from finding the cheapest option to deciding whether a price feels credible and justified, bringing trust into the decision alongside cost.Discount-led growth has reached its limitsDiscount-driven strategies can deliver volume, but they struggle to build durable preference. In crowded digital marketplaces, constant price competition erodes margins and conditions users to switch platforms effortlessly. Evidence from travel and ecommerce sectors shows that loyalty formed purely through discounts is fragile. Once incentives disappear, so does engagement. Travellers today expect platforms to…  ​Read More​YourStory RSS Feed

Launched in 2014, PhotoSparks is a weekly feature from YourStory, with photographs that celebrate the spirit of creativity and innovation. In the earlier 955 posts, we featured an art festival, cartoon gallery. world music festival, telecom expo, millets fair, climate change expo, wildlife conference, startup festival, Diwali rangoli, and jazz festival.In our first photo essay from the India AI Impact Expo, we featured Indian startups and corporates who have developed offerings for the Indian market. In this photo essay, we feature international pavilions of France, the UK, Russia, Australia, Japan, and Africa, as well as a range of global products for AI.The India AI Impact Summit is well underway this week in New Delhi, at Bharat Mandapam and other nearby venues across the city. Convened under the IndiaAI Mission, the summit is the culmination of regional conferences over the past year to gather inputs on local AI needs.Also ReadBreaking barriers in 2025: Women’s progress at work and what the road ahead demandsFeatured tracks address AI and technology leadership, industrial automation, sectoral impact frameworks, global development, data colonialism, equitable access, and co-creative models instead of extractive frameworks. Many of these sessions run in parallel across Bharat Mandapam and allied venues.A number of global and national developments on the AI front have also unfolded recently. For…  ​Read More​YourStory RSS Feed

Google’s AI research lab, DeepMind, has announced a partnership with the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), India’s apex research body,…

The delegation from the International Trade Administration (ITA) of the US Department of Commerce, led by the Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade, William Kimmitt, visited Bengaluru, interacting with American and Indian tech companies.This is the first segment of the visit to India ahead of the Department of Commerce’s participation in the 2026 India AI Impact Summit, and the delegation was keen to understand how these tech companies were investing in AI, operationalising AI in their business models, and creating US-India tech partnership opportunities. The delegation visits on February 17 included Chevron Engine, Google DeepMind, South Park Commons, and Biocon.“It is a privilege to visit the heart of tech innovation in Bangalore at such a critical juncture for the US.-India relationship,” said Under Secretary William Kimmitt.“The new, historic trade agreement between the US and India will cement our bilateral relationship for decades to come and promote the adoption of cutting-edge U.S. technologies in the Indian market. The United States welcomes India’s participation in the American AI Exports Program, and we look forward to working with trusted partners to power a new age of prosperity and security with American AI leadership,” Kimmitt saidIn addition to industry meetings, Under Secretary Kimmitt,…  ​Read More​YourStory RSS Feed