Apple is hoping to assemble in India 25 per cent of all iPhones produced globally to reduce its heavy dependence on China.

Hardening interest rates globally and worsening geo-political situation have impacted the foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows into India in 2022-23, a top government official said on Tuesday. Secretary of the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) Rajesh Kumar Singh said that the department would analyse the reasons for the contraction in FDI in five important sectors like computer hardware and software; construction, education, automobiles and metallurgical industries. “I cannot think of any other reason. It is not as if our FDI policies have become protectionist. “On the contrary, we have kept it very very liberal … The decline is combination of hardening of interest rates along with geo-political risks going up around the world. In general the appetite may be less,” Singh told PTI in an interview.

The addition of new flights at airports will now be based on passenger-handling capacity at security checkpoints, according to the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS). The civil aviation security regulator issued directions in this regard on May 22 in a move to reduce congestion and delays inside airport terminals. Following this, airports will have to check passenger-handling capacity at security checkpoints before allotting slots.

India’s urban unemployment rate declined in Q4FY23 to 6.8 per cent – the lowest in over four years — after it stagnated at 7.2 per cent in the previous October-December quarter, reflecting improvement in the labour market, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) released by the National Statistical Office (NSO) on Monday. The unemployment rate in current weekly status (CWS) terms for all ages in the March quarter was the lowest recorded in more than four years, from the time the NSO released India’s first quarterly urban jobless rate for the December quarter in 2018. The jobless rate in urban areas had been on a continuous decline since the peak of 20.8 per cent in the April-June quarter of FY21.