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Curd, lassi, cheque books, ink among things to turn costlier

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Come July 18, 18 per cent Goods and Services Tax (GST) will be applicable on bank cheque book/loose leaf cheques and 12 per cent on maps, atlas, and globes.

Similarly, unbranded but pre-packed curd, lassi, butter milk, food items, grains etc will be brought under the GST net from the exemption list.

Writing, printing, or drawing ink will also become costlier.

The rate rationalisation decision was taken at the two-day 47th GST Council Meeting, chaired by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, that started in Chandigarh on Tuesday.

On the other hand, the GST rates on medical items like ostomy and orthopaedic appliances – splints and other fracture appliances, artificial parts of the body, other appliances which are worn or carried, or implanted in the body, to compensate for a defect or disability, and intraocular lens- has come down to five per cent from 12 per cent.

The GST for transport of good and passengers by ropeway is down to five per cent from 18 per cent and the renting of truck/goods carriage where cost of fuel is included brought down by six per cent to 12 per cent.

The other items for which GST rates has been increased are printing, writing or drawing ink (12 per cent to 18 per cent), knives with cutting blades, paper knives, pencil sharpeners and blades therefor, spoons, forks, ladles, skimmers, cake-servers etc (12 per cent to 18 per cent), power driven pumps primarily designed for handling water such as centrifugal pumps, deep tube-well turbine pumps, submersible pumps; bicycle pumps (12 per cent to 18 per cent).

The rate on machines for cleaning, sorting or grading seed, and grain pulses, machinery used in milling industry or for the working of cereals etc, ‘pawan chakki’, or air-based atta chakki, wet grinder goes up from five per cent to 18 per cent.

Machines for cleaning, sorting or grading eggs, fruit or other agricultural produce and its parts, milking machines and dairy machinery will have rates going up from 12 per cent to 18 per cent.

LED lamps, lights and fixture, their metal printed circuits board, drawing and marking instruments move up from 12 per cent to 18 per cent and solar water heater and systems, prepared/finished leather/chamois leather/composition leathers from five per cent to 12 per cent.

In respect of the services, the rates have been revised upwards in the case of services supplied by a foreman in a chit fund, job work in relation to processing of hides, skins and leather, leather goods and footwear, manufacture of clay bricks, and works contract for roads, bridges, railways, metro, effluent treatment plant, crematorium and others.

The concessional rates for electronic waste, petroleum, and coal bed methane has also been increased.

Exemption on transport of passengers by air to and from North East states and Bagdogra is being restricted to economy class.

Hotel accommodation, priced upto Rs 1,000 per day, shall be taxed at 12 per cent and room rent (excluding ICU) exceeding Rs 5,000 per day per patient charged by a hospital shall be taxed to the extent of amount charged for the room at five per cent without input tax credit.

Tax exemption on training or coaching in recreational activities relating to arts or culture, or sports is being restricted to such services when supplied by an individual.

Exemption on following services is being withdrawn – transportation by rail or a vessel of railway equipment and material, storage or warehousing of commodities which attract tax (nuts, spices, copra, jaggery, cotton etc.), fumigation in a warehouse of agricultural produce, services by the RBI, the IRDA, the SEBI, and the FSSAI, GSTN, renting of residential dwelling to business entities (registered persons), and services provided by the cord blood banks by way of preservation of stem cells.

Business

Why Nvidia chief Jensen Huang is not ready to retire?

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Chapel Hill (North Carolina), Sep 3: Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang says he does not need to keep working.

He simply cannot bear the thought of missing what artificial intelligence (AI) could deliver over the next decade.

“I’ve been working a long time and Surely I don’t have to work, but I don’t want to miss, I’m definitely not going to miss the next 10, 15 years,” Huang said during a fireside chat with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

For Huang, the appeal lies not only in the technology but also in the scale of the ambitions it has unleashed.

“The ambition of the industry, the ambition of my colleagues, my own ambition has really been supercharged,” he said.

Huang offered a buoyant vision of an AI-powered future in which work that once took a decade could be completed in a year, while year-long projects could be finished within a month.

“What do I expect in the next five, ten years? Things that take ten years are going to take one. Things that take one will take a month,” he added.

The Nvidia Chief said that artificial intelligence was giving ordinary people, companies and countries the ability to tackle problems on a scale previously considered unimaginable.

“It is now possible for average humans like ourselves to think that we can make an impact on a hundred trillion dollar industry,” Huang added.

He said that innovators were talking about adding between $20 trillion and $50 trillion in economic benefits worldwide.

Such ideas, he added, reflected a new level of ambition made possible by access to AI.

“No time in history have we been able to say things like that,” he said.

Huang encouraged countries to approach the technology with optimism and raise their ambitions rather than allow uncertainty to dominate the public conversation.

“This is the time when you have to feel enlightened, inspired, supercharged, lifted, because you now have this incredible technology behind you,” he said.

He compared the development of AI with earlier technological advances that initially appeared almost magical.

“Electricity once made it possible to turn on a light from far away, while modern cars and aircraft became safer as their technology improved.”

AI, Huang said, would similarly advance through engineering, mathematics, software and responsible development.

He rejected predictions that the technology would simply remove human workers.

AI would automate certain skills and tasks, he said, but people would retain the purpose, context and meaning that define their jobs.

Huang also described AI as a great equaliser because people could now communicate with computers through ordinary human language.

Lutnick picked up that theme, suggesting that the technology could place advanced knowledge within everyone’s reach.

“You now can have… A PhD in everything. That’s right. At your fingertips,” Lutnick said.

“You are that person now. Right? Everybody is that person now,” Huang responded.

Lutnick praised Huang’s optimistic assessment and called him “an American treasure”, saying Nvidia was leading the United States towards a future once confined largely to science fiction.

“Your company is leading us in a path that none of us, when we were young, ever dreamed possible,” the US Commerce Secretary said.

Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and has served as its President and Chief Executive since its inception.

The company began as a specialist in graphics technology before its processors became vital to the development and operation of modern artificial intelligence systems.

Born in Taiwan, Huang moved to the United States as a child and studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University and Stanford University.

Under his leadership, Nvidia has grown into one of the world’s most valuable technology companies.

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Business

Indian markets open higher amid positive global cues, easing US yields

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Mumbai, Sep 3: Indian equity benchmarks opened higher on Thursday tracking positive global cues and gains in Asian markets.

Sensex opened 154.60 points or 0.20 per cent higher at 76,724.95, while Nifty gained 83.50 points or 0.35 per cent to 23,997.95.

In early trade, banking and realty stocks led sectoral gains as Nifty PSU Bank and Nifty Realty gained up to 1 per cent.

Meanwhile, Nifty Private Bank climbed 0.83 per cent and Nifty MidSmall Financial Services index advanced 0.82 per cent.

On the other hand, Nifty IT fell 0.8 per cent, while Nifty FMCG dropped 0.44 per cent and Nifty Healthcare, Nifty Pharma and Nifty500 Healthcare were also marginally lower.

According to market experts, sentiment was likely to improve following a slight easing in US bond yields.

They said the mobilisation of $136 billion under a concessional swap facility, including $127 billion through the FCNR(B) scheme could support the rupee and improve foreign investor confidence.

The large FCNR(B) mobilisation by banks could also help improve net interest margins, providing support to banking stocks, they said.

They noted that Wednesday’s 141-point decline in Nifty came despite institutional buying of about Rs 9,500 crore comprising Rs 6,688 crore from foreign institutional investors and Rs 2,812 crore from domestic institutional investors.

“This suggested that selling pressure had largely come from retail investors, proprietary traders and bears,” according to the experts.

Technical analysts said the rebound from around 23,800 had strengthened expectations of a move higher, although they remained cautious about chasing prices. A break above the 24,150-24,215 zone would signal further strength, while 23,860 was seen as an important downside marker.

Additionally, Asian equities broadly mirrored gains on Wall Street. In addition, crude oil prices edged lower after US President Donald Trump downplayed the likelihood of an extended conflict with Iran.

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Meta launches ‘Muse Voice Transcribe’ with native support for five Indian languages

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New Delhi, Sep 2: US-based technology giant Meta has introduced its first real‑time audio‑perception model — Muse Voice Transcribe — which offers native support for five major Indian languages and advanced streaming features.

Muse Voice Transcribe — developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs — delivers streaming transcription, speaker separation across over 20 voices in hour‑plus recordings, native code‑switching and diarisation from a single model with no post‑processing step, the company said in a statement.

Muse Voice Transcribe is trained across over 70 languages spoken in multiple countries with 25 validated at launch.

“It ranks first on the Artificial Analysis streaming speech-to-text leaderboard as of September 1, 2026,” the statement added.

Available via the Meta Model API and already running dictation in Meta AI for Mac and Muse Code, Muse Voice Transcribe delivers real‑time automatic speech recognition, diarisation with over 20 speakers and endpointing.

It is multilingual with seamless code-switching and improves accuracy with language, keyword, and context biasing.

“The longer the model waits to predict, the more accurate the transcript, but the higher the latency. Muse Voice Transcribe has “adaptive delay,” dynamically changing delay for each word based on difficulty,” the statement noted.

This is enabled with reinforcement learning (RL), where word error rate (WER) reward and a delay reward are combined multiplicatively.

“Muse Voice Transcribe is an autoregressive multimodal model from the Muse Spark family,” Meta said.

It explained that the audio is processed in 80 ms chunks (12.5 Hz), each of which is transformed into a single soft token. At each audio chunk, the model decides to either continue listening to the next audio chunk or emit a text token.

With adaptive delay, Muse Voice Transcribe achieves the Pareto front on speed-accuracy trade-off measured by time to final transcription, the company said.

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