NEW DELHI: Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran has asked over 30 CEOs and managing directors of group companies to brace for a tougher business environment, as the war in West Asia is disrupting supply chains, sources said.At a review meeting on the war’s implications on Thursday, Chandrasekaran told top executives that more than 10,000 Tata employees are based in the region, including those from Voltas, TCS, Indian Hotels, and Titan (including Damas), and outlined steps to facilitate their return, according to a person with direct knowledge.

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During the assessment, a common theme that emerged was that supply chain disruptions and rising commodity prices would weigh on demand, while pushing up operating costs, resulting in margin pressure, the sources said. For many of the companies, it would mean that production yield is likely to be less than capacity.“The chairman advised to be prepared for tougher business environment marked by demand slowdown, project delays, driven by supply chain disruptions and cost increases due to oil price, shortages, currency movements, logistics costs, among others,” the source said.Chandrasekaran recommended measures that need to be focused on conserving and managing cash carefully and judiciously. He also advised careful choosing of starttime for projects and “if necessary, have a relook at the timelines”. Top group executives were also informed about the need to enhance cyber security readiness and network resilience, run cost improvement programmes with clear targets. Moreover, he also stressed on the need to “take care of employees, including temporary employees”.“Further, we need to immediately address anxiety and stress-related issues of our employees and their families in the region.” Chandrasekaran said the group has assisted in enabling travel back home of employees and their families in transit in the UAE through Air India.He urged executives to be prepared for post-recovery scenario once conflict is over. “You must be in a state of readiness — be agile; do not lose momentum,” Chandrasekaran is understood to have told the top executives.

MUMBAI: Staging a spirited recovery, stock markets pared early losses to close higher on Thursday, sensex rising by 185 points and Nifty settling above 22,700 on strong value buying in IT and banking shares and a sharp rebound in the rupee.Rebounding more than 2,000 points from the day’s low, sensex finally settled higher by 185 points, or 0.3%, at 73,320. The index opened lower and tanked further by 1,588 points to hit a day’s low of 71,546 in the first half of the session. Strong value buying in IT bellwethers like HCL Tech and TCS, and banking giants HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank, helped the barometer recover from sharp losses, hitting a high of 73,569 in the pre-close session.On the NSE, the Nifty followed a similar trajectory and closed above 22,700 at 22,713, up by 34 points, or 0.2%. The index fell 497 points, or 2.2%, in early trade before recovering to hit a high of 22,782.A sharp rebound in the rupee after RBI stepped in with a slew of measures to restrict banks from onshore forward markets also helped improve investor sentiment.A total of 2,649 stocks advanced, while 1,589 declined and 149 remain unchanged on the BSE.“Indian equity markets opened on the back foot as Trump’s renewed threat to strike Iran ‘extremely hard’ swiftly erased the optimism built in the prior session, triggering broad-based selling across Asian markets,” said Vinod Nair, Head of Research, Geojit Investments.Crude oil spiked more than 7% after Trump’s speech, with Brent trading at %109 per barrel.

MUMBAI: The rupee recorded its strongest recovery in 13 years, rising 173 paise to close at 93.1 from Tuesday’s 94.83, after RBI tightened rules to curb speculative bets and forced a sharp unwinding of dollar positions.However, with a fresh round of US bombing in Iran post market hours, which resulted in global oil prices surging further, dealers are wary of a fresh wave of volatility when forex markets open next week.Thursday’s rebound followed a series of regulatory steps aimed at squeezing short positions and arbitrage trades. The central bank barred offshore non-deliverable forwards, restricted rebooking of cancelled foreign exchange contracts, and capped banks’ forex positions at $100 million, triggering heavy dollar sales in the domestic market.The measures lifted the currency while widening the gap between onshore and offshore markets, and pushed up hedging costs. RBI had taken similar measures in 2013 to stabilise the currency after a sharp fall.The rupee had been under pressure from a surge in oil prices driven by the West Asia conflict and global risk aversion, which widened the current account gap. The currency fell over 4% since Feb 28 before its recovery, and around 10% in FY26, making it among the weakest in the region.Rupee had breached the 95 level earlier in the week and closed at 94.70 before hitting a low of 94.84. Markets are closed on April 3 on account of a public holiday for Good Friday.Dealers said that the no deliverable forward market, which functions with both parties placing bets in foreign currency on​ rupee’s movement direction, has emerged to be larger than the spot market. With many players betting on the rupee weakening in the offshore markets, banks have been able to arbitrage by buying dollars in the onshore market and selling them offshore. These trades have added to the pressure on the rupee.RBI curbs have reduced market liquidity, widened bid ask spreads, and fragmented trading across segments. A fallout of the curbs would be reduced interest in Indian bonds as the cost of hedging them have gone up.

Closes 173p Up At 93.1 After RBI Reins In Speculation, $ Positions

Dealers said that the rupee will continue to receive support with banks unwinding open positions on dollar ahead of the Apr 10 deadline, with the currency seen trading in a range of around 92.20 to 93.20.

US defence secretary Pete Hegseth has asked army chief of staff general Randy George to step down and take immediate retirement, reports CBS News.Hegseth reportedly wants someone in the role who will fully implement the vision he and President Trump have for the army. A senior defence department official told CBS News, “We are grateful for his service, but it was time for a leadership change in the Army.“George is a West Point graduate and career infantry officer who has served in the military for decades. He was commissioned in 1988 and has deployed during Operation Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom. Before being appointed army chief of staff, George served as vice chief of staff from 2022 to 2023 and as senior military assistant to US defence secretary Lloyd Austin from 2021 to 2022 during the Biden administration.George was nominated for the position of army chief of staff by then US President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate in 2023. A typical four-year term would have kept him in the post until 2027.The current vice chief of staff, general Christopher LaNeve, who previously served as Hegseth’s military aide and as commanding general of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division from 2022 to 2023, will serve as acting Army chief of staff. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said LaNeve is “a battle-tested leader with decades of operational experience and is completely trusted by Secretary Hegseth to carry out the vision of this administration without fault.”Hegseth has previously fired over a dozen senior military officers. The decision to remove George was not related to a recent incident in which Hegseth overruled the Army’s suspension of an aircrew that flew by American artist Kid Rock’s house in Nashville. After the suspension and an administrative review, Hegseth wrote on his personal X account, “No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots.” George’s ouster was independent of this event.

Google has launched Gemma 4, the latest and most capable version of its open-source AI model family. The company says that the latest models mark a significant step forward in making frontier-level artificial intelligence (AI) accessible to developers everywhere: from powerful data centre workstations to a smartphone in your pocket. Google claims that since it released the first generation of Gemma, developers have downloaded it more than 400 million times, spawning a community ecosystem of over 100,000 model variants built on top of Google’s foundation.Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the models pack “incredible amount of intelligence per parameter”, while Google DeepMind chief executive called Gemma 4 as the “best open models in the world for their respective sizes.”“Gemma 4 is here, and it’s packing an incredible amount of intelligence per parameter,” said Pichai, while sharing a post by Hassabis, who said: “Excited to launch Gemma 4: the best open models in the world for their respective sizes. Available in 4 sizes that can be fine-tuned for your specific task: 31B dense for great raw performance, 26B MoE for low latency, and effective 2B & 4B for edge device use – happy building!”Gemma 4 is available now under an Apache 2.0 licence, meaning developers can use, modify and build on it freely.

Four Gemma 4 models, one goal

Google is releasing Gemma 4 in four sizes, designed to cover everything from mobile devices to high-end developer machines:

That last number is particularly striking. The 31B model said to have outperformed competitors 20 times its size.

What Gemma 4 can do

Google says Gemma 4 moves well beyond basic question-and-answer chat. Key capabilities include:Advanced reasoning: The model can handle multi-step planning and complex logic, with improvements in mathematics and instruction-following tasks.Agentic workflows: Gemma 4 natively supports function-calling, structured data output and system instructions, allowing developers to build AI agents that can interact with external tools, APIs and services autonomously.Code generation: Developers can run Gemma 4 entirely offline on a local machine, turning a standard workstation into a private AI coding assistant.Vision and audio: All four models can process images and video natively. The two smaller edge models also support audio input for speech recognition.Long context windows: The edge models can process up to 128,000 tokens in a single prompt, while the larger models stretch to 256,000 tokens.140+ languages: Finally, Gemma 4 has been trained natively across more than 140 languages, making it one of the most globally inclusive open models available.

Gemma models for smartphones

Perhaps the best aspect of Gemma 4 is just how small Google has managed to make it while keeping it powerful. According to The E2B and E4B models were built from the ground up in close collaboration with Google’s Pixel team, Qualcomm Technologies and MediaTek — the companies behind the chips that power billions of Android devices worldwide. The result is a model that runs completely offline, with near-zero latency, on everyday devices including phones, Raspberry Pi boards and Nvidia Jetson hardware.Google describes Gemma 4 as being built from the same world-class research and technology that powers Gemini 3, its flagship proprietary model.