Noted

Approved: By the board of approvals chaired by Commerce Secretary G.K. Pillai, 27 proposals for special economic zones (SEZs), including those by Larsen & Toubro, JSW Bengal Steel, Ansal Properties & Infrastructure and Bharat Forge. It also gave in-principle approvals to 10 tax-free zones.

Planned: By Power Grid Corporation of India, investments of Rs 4,824 crore over the next four years to set up transmission lines to supply power generated from the Mundra power plant to the electricity grid. Tata Power has been awarded the contract to build the ultra mega power plant at Mundra, which has a capacity to generate 4,000 MW of electricity.

Relaxed: By the Finance Ministry, norms on the amount of money infrastructure companies can raise via external commercial borrowings. Such companies can now raise up to $500 million (Rs 2,300 crore), or five times more than what they could earlier.

Unveiled: By Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, the Xeon 7400 series processor, its first Made in India chip, which has been designed entirely by its Bangalore team and developed in a record two years. It marks the first time that work on the 45 nanometre technology was taken up by the company outside the US.

Scrapped: By the Anil Agarwalowned Vedanta Resources, its restructuring programme due to opposition from shareholders, who felt the plan favoured the management to the detriment of other shareholders. The LSE-listed company had announced a major revamp to split its organisation into three groups: aluminium & energy, copper & zinc and iron ore.

Sealed: By the Anil Ambani-promoted Reliance Big Entertainment (RBE), a partnership with iconic Hollywood director Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks.

RBE will invest $1.5 billion (Rs 6,900 crore) in Dreamworks over a number of years, of which $500 million (Rs 2,300 crore) will be in the form of equity and the rest as debt.