Top News Podcast: ‘Delhi, Mumbai 3rd COVID wave peak this week’; standard income tax deduction likely to be hiked; IT stocks rally and more

Episode 178,   Jan 11, 2022, 02:02 PM

While the Omicron variant becoming dominant in the metro, Delhi and Mumbai are likely to witness the peak of the third COVID-19 wave this week, Dr Anurag Agrawal, Director at Council of Scientific and Industrial Research - Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB) said on Tuesday.

Delhi, meanwhile, has ordered all private offices to remain shut and operate from home amid surging cases.  On the business front, Kumar Rajagopalan, the CEO of Retailers Association of India (RAI), said the pace of growth in India's retail business has taken a hit since the last week of December due to fresh restrictions.

In the market, gains in IT and financial stocks pushed the benchmark indices higher for the third straight session. Meanwhile, global brokerage Morgan Stanley pointed to the possibility of BSE Sensex’s rally to is 70,000 with the union budget being a possible catalyst.

In this edition of Top News Podcast, CNBCTV18.com’s Kanishka Sarkar also shares reports that suggest the government is considering increasing the standard income tax deduction of Rs 50,000 by 30-35 percent in Budget 2022.

She also shares a development from the US, where doctors have transplanted a pig heart into a patient in a last-ditch effort to save his life and he's doing well three days after the highly experimental surgery.

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