The Monetary Policy Committee meets from 5 to 7 October and announces on the Wednesday. The repo rate has been 5.25% through four straight reviews, after 125 basis points of cuts in 2025. What makes this meeting different from the last four is that the question is no longer whether the holding continues but whether it reverses: a hike would be the first since February 2023.

The polls lean one way. Economists surveyed by Business Standard expect 25 basis points to 5.50%, and a Reuters poll run between 18 and 28 September had close to 60% of respondents on the same call. The reasons are all in the same direction and none of them is domestic demand. CPI inflation was 4.82% in August against 4.45% in July, with food and beverages at 5.95%. Brent was $102.70 on 2 October, above $100 for a stretch now. And the rupee has been trading within touching distance of its record low of 96.96, which imports the oil price into everything else. Several major central banks have already moved.

For a borrower the number matters less than the mechanism. A repo-linked loan does not reprice on the announcement; it reprices on its own reset date, which may be three months away, and the EMI then changes by the lender's choice of tenor or instalment. This is also the moment the cheapest credit in the market gets more expensive: bank lending to micro and small enterprises grew 22.6% year on year and to medium enterprises 30.5%, so a great deal of recently drawn MSME debt is sitting on floating rates set during the cutting cycle.

The Nifty 50 closed at 22,421.95, down 3.1% on the week from 23,140.50, and the Sensex at 71,909.70, down 2.7% from 73,895.74. That is an eighth consecutive weekly fall — the longest weekly losing streak in close to twenty-five years — and it was done in four sessions, with the exchanges shut on Friday 2 October for Gandhi Jayanti. The named drags were a sharp fall in the rupee, continued foreign outflows, rising bond yields, crude above $100 and below-normal monsoon rainfall.

The flows are where this week breaks from the previous seven. Foreign institutions sold a net ₹34,966 crore — a seventh straight week of selling, and triple the ₹11,490 crore they took out the week before. Domestic institutions bought a net ₹33,455 crore, which is a very large number by any standard and is still ₹1,511 crore less than the selling. For seven weeks this paper has been able to write that domestic money was not merely absorbing the foreign exit but outweighing it. This week it did not, and that is the first week in the run where the index had to find the difference in price.

Hold the two numbers next to each other before reading a verdict into either. Eight weeks of falling have taken the Nifty from roughly 23,800 to 22,421.95, which is under 6% — a slow grind, not a break, and the reason it has been slow is the domestic bid. What changed this week is the margin, not the direction, and the margin is the thing to watch when trading resumes on Monday 5 October into an MPC week: a central bank that raises into a falling rupee gives the foreign seller one reason less to sell, and the domestic buyer one reason more to wait.

RIICO has put more than 500 plots across its industrial areas up for allotment by e-auction, in the full spread of categories — industrial, commercial, logistics, residential, group housing, hospitals and nursing homes, kiosks, schools, shops and petrol pumps. The last dates for depositing earnest money are 13 and 14 October 2026, depending on the auction.

Running alongside it is the 14th Phase of the Direct Allotment Policy, open from 28 September and closing 12 October 2026 at 6 p.m., under which RR MoU holders apply for plots directly rather than bidding. If you signed an MoU at Rising Rajasthan and have not converted it into land, that window is the shorter of the two and it closes on a Monday evening.

The appetite is not theoretical. In RIICO's auction of undeveloped and semi-developed plots, 128 entrepreneurs bid for 12 plots — better than ten applicants per plot, which tells you both that land in the right location is scarce and that a bid placed casually is unlikely to win. Last fortnight this column made the point that the deposit date, not the bidding date, is the one that eliminates people. It is worth making twice: the EMD dates are 13 and 14 October, and no amount of readiness on auction day recovers a deposit that went in late.