Welcome to Top of the Morning by Mint, your weekday newscast that brings you five major stories from the world of business. It's Monday, March 18, 2024. My name is Nelson John. Let's get started:

Late on Thursday, the State Bank of India released the list of donors from the Electoral Bonds list. Electoral bonds were an anonymous way to donate to political parties, which India’s Supreme Court declared unconstitutional last month. The court also ordered the previously anonymous data to be made public, which means the public can understand which party has been funded by whom since 2017. The data provided enough material for our Plain Facts team to pore over and investigate. Our partners at How India Lives . com dive deeper into the donations made by Madanlal Limited — a Kolkata-based company that bought bonds worth 186 crore rupees. Its website showed that Madanlal is part of two other companies: MKJ group and Keventers Group, both of whom also bought the same bonds. But How India Lives is investigating Madanlal because its total declared income in financial year 2022 was just 3 crore rupees. Does this seem odd? Read this story to dive deeper into how the purchase of electoral bonds worked.

Over the weekend, the election commission of India also announced the dates for the upcoming general elections in India. The 2024 elections will be held in seven phases across the country. Shuja Asrar and Tanay Sukumar of our Plain Facts team bring you a retrospective view on the history of Lok Sabha elections in the country. How do women vote? Is there a divide in the number of voters between north and south India? What are the battlegrounds for the major states? Shuja and Tanay answer these crucial questions with granular data, put together using visualisations to help see India’s electoral behaviour in a new light. 

An average investor places their money in a mutual fund when they trust that the fund manager can make more sound decisions on their behalf. But what happens when mutual funds make seemingly unsound investing choices? Mint's corporates reporter Nehal Chaliawala and markets correspondent Ram Sahgal write about the curious trend in ICICI Securities stock. ICICI is mulling if its securities arm should de-list — a process that usually reduces the share price of a company. Despite this move, mutual funds have continued to buy the stock. What's behind this move? Nehal and Ram speak to analysts, who expect this move to fall through, which would justify their bullish position on the stock. If not, these funds are in for a heavy loss — a prospect that might not be treated kindly by investors.

It's rare to find women in the mutual fund ecosystem — and even rarer to find them at the head of the table. But Radhika Gupta has defied all such boundaries. She is the CEO of Edelweiss mutual funds. Mint Money's Jash Kriplani speaks to Gupta on her current allocation mix. Here is her portfolio, in her own words:

Everyone wants a quick hiring process. Multinational companies, more so. Tata Consultancy Services is going one step above to assure this: it is providing more monetary incentive to its hiring firms to hire quicker. Under an aptly-named 'quick joiner incentive plan', TCS is offering its hiring vendors 40,000 rupees extra if the potential hire joins within 30 days. IT reporter Jas Bardia and HR and workplaces correspondent Devina Sengupta team up to bring you this report on one of India's leading IT companies and its age-old problem.

Devina is also a host of The Working Life, where she speaks to HR executives about problems like these. In her latest episode, Devina speaks to Arundhati Bhattacharya, CEO of Salesforce in India, about the common problems around HR and hiring in corporate India.

We'd love to hear your feedback on this podcast. Let us know by writing to us at [email protected]. You may send us feedback, tips or anything that you feel we should be covering from your vantage point in the world of business and finance.

Show notes:

Electoral bonds: The curious case of Madanlal Ltd’s donations 

History of Lok Sabha polls in numbers: More women in fray, fewer independent MPs 

ICICI Securities wants to delist. Why are mutual funds buying its shares? 

How Edelweiss’s Radhika Gupta dialed up risk in her portfolio 

TCS' incentive to get candidates under 30 days

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