New rules and changes effective from February 1

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present the Union Budget today. In addition to that, several new rules will be effective from today.

Below are the details:

From today, the customers of Punjab National Bank will not be able to withdraw cash from non-EMV ATMs. The bank took this decision to prevent ATM frauds. Customers cannot perform both financial and non-financial transactions using non-EMV ATMs. Non-EMV ATMs do not hold the card during a transaction. Besides, they can read a customer’s data through a magnetic strip.

The Indian Railway Catering Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) resumes the e-catering services from today which were suspended in the past due to the outbreak of coronavirus. IRCTC decided to resume the e-catering services phase-wise. These services will now be available at 62 stations like New Delhi, Pune, Bhopal, Patna, Lucknow etc. Passengers can book their lunch or dinner on the trains with these services through an app or online.

The government of India released new standard operating procedures (SOPs) for COVID-19. As per these revised SOPs, cinema halls have been allowed to operate 100 per cent seating company.

SpiceJet announced to start operations on 20 new routes from February. Out of these 20 new domestic flights, 16 services will be connecting Jaipur to various other cities and the remaining four services will be on Kolkata-Pakyong route and Delhi-Dehradun route.

As per the crude price in the international markets, oil companies revise prices of LPG on the first day of each month. As they revise LPG prices today, the prices are likely to change from today.

Mumbai local train services will be resumed from today after a gap of around 10 months. The government suspended these train services in March last year due to the outbreak of COVID-19 in the country.

Schools in several states including Gujarat, Telangana, Himachal Pradesh, Bihar, Meghalaya etc. will reopen from today for students of class 9 and above.

The government made the FASTags mandatory on toll plazas across the country from February 15. Though the government extended the deadline for the usage of FASTags several times, the latest is February 15. Currently, only one lane is dedicated for cash payments at toll plazas while the remaining are dedicated for FASTag users.

Image Credit: Biswarup Ganguly / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Image Reference: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:High_School_Students_-_Science_City_-_Kolkata_2012-07-31_0705.JPG