Wipro Technologies Ltd. plans to buy Citigroup Inc.'s India-based information technology business for $127 million in cash, the companies said Tuesday.

The deal comes amid a broad restructuring at Citigroup (nyse: C - news - people ) as the New York financial giant struggles through the worst banking crisis in decades.

The company avoided collapse in November by securing another $20 billion lifeline from the government and has also announced plans to sell banking units in Japan and Germany.

Citi Technology Services Ltd., based in Mumbai, provides IT services for Citigroup's operations in more than 32 countries, Citigroup said.

As part of the deal, Citi will award Wipro (nyse: WIT - news - people ) a contract worth at least $500 million in revenue over the next six years to provide technology infrastructure and application development services. The companies expect the deal to close by March 2009.

Citigroup said the business has about 1,650 employees and is projected to generate $80 million in revenue for 2008.

Wipro shares added 32 cents, or 4 percent, to $8.40 in midday trading, while Citigroup shares fell 18 cents, or 2.6 percent, to $6.57.

The Indian government plans to spend an additional $4 billion to boost the nation's slowing economy, the Prime Minister's Office said Sunday.

The government also announced targeted measures to help exporters, small businesses and textile manufacturers, a plan to expand mortgage lending and a cut in a valued-added tax.

It also said a state-run financing firm will be allowed to issue $2 billion worth of tax-free bonds to finance infrastructure projects.

"The government is keeping a close watch on the evolving economic situation and will not hesitate to take any additional steps that may be needed to counter recessionary trends and maintain the pace of economic activity," the Prime Minister's Office said in a statement.

Growth skidded to 7.6 percent last quarter - off from 9.3 percent in the third quarter of 2007_ and exports shrank in October for the first time in seven years.

India's ballooning fiscal deficit means it can do far less than a country like China - which last month announced a $586 billion stimulus package - to spend its way out of an economic slump.

Citibank said in a report Thursday that it expects India's deficit in this fiscal year will swell from 6 percent to 8.6 percent of its gross domestic product - far higher than the government's target.

Pakistani officials, responding to charges by Indian leaders that the attack was carried out by an organization with ties to Pakistan, said Friday that a senior intelligence officer would travel to India, in an apparent attempt to ease tensions between the two nuclear-armed states.

Indian officials said they believe that at least some of the gunmen reached Mumbai by sea. After an interrogation of one of the attackers, Indian intelligence officials said they suspected that a Pakistani Islamist group, Lashkar-i-Taiba, was responsible. An Indian intelligence document from 2006 obtained by The Washington Post said members of the group had been trained in maritime assault.

Authorities said that the death toll had risen to 195 as more bodies were discovered and that 295 people were wounded, in attacks on the hotels, the Jewish center and several other sites in Mumbai. Among the dead were two Americans from Virginia; the American rabbi who ran the city's Chabad-Lubavitch center and his Israeli wife; and three of their visitors, including an American man, an Israeli woman and a man with U.S. and Israeli citizenship. In all, at least 16 non-Indians have been reported killed.

Security forces killed the last gunmen holed up in the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel here early Saturday and clean-up operations around the sites that had been attacked continued through the day. 

The government used 350 security forces and 400 police officers to capture or kill the gunmen, officials announced at a news conference Saturday. On the basis of preliminary inquiry, we know that there were a total of 10 terrorists. Nine have been eliminated, one is caught," said Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of the state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital. "They split into teams of two for action, and there were four at the Taj."

In Washington, the White House announced that President Bush would speak about the Mumbai attacks at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time.

President-elect Barack Obama spoke Friday evening by phone with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to offer his condolences for those killed, Obama's office announced Saturday.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke by telephone Friday with Obama for the third time since the attacks began to update him on information coming from India.

"These terrorists who targeted innocent civilians will not defeat India's great democracy, nor shake the will of a global coalition to defeat them," Obama said in a statement. "The United States must stand with India and all nations and people who are committed to destroying terrorist networks, and defeating their hate-filled ideology."

Deshmukh denied that there was any final statement to make about the nationality of the slain gunmen. But he said that the government was only certain that the one in their custody had confessed to being from Pakistan. He said Indian officials had no specific intelligence about an impending attack.

"The information that we get is always general, not specific. Mumbai is always on the target, it is a commercial city, it is an international city," he said. "It is a sensitive place, there is no denying that. But this kind of attack, not just on Mumbai but also on the nation, is something we did not anticipate."

MUMBAI, Nov. 28 -- Indian army commandos struggled all day Thursday and into the early hours of Friday to regain control of two luxury hotels and a Jewish center in India's commercial capital, battling armed assailants who were part of a group that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said was "based outside the country."

The coordinated attacks against well-known symbols of India's prosperity and places where Westerners and Israelis gather left at least 125 people dead and more than 320 wounded, authorities said, and transformed parts of Mumbai into a smoldering war zone. Dozens of people remained trapped in the vast hotels, although it was unclear how many gunmen were still inside.

Indian police and terrorism experts said they were uncertain who had carried out the attack, but Singh, in a nationally televised address, used phrases usually taken here to mean Pakistan, raising fears that the violence in Mumbai could raise tensions between the nuclear-armed rivals.

"The group which carried out these attacks, based outside the country, had come with single-minded determination to create havoc in the commercial capital of the country," Singh said. "We will take up strongly with our neighbors that the use of their territory for launching attacks on us will not be tolerated, and that there would be a cost if suitable measures are not taken by them."

Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, said his government condemned the attacks in Mumbai. "It is unfair to blame Pakistan or Pakistanis for these acts of terrorism even before an investigation is undertaken," Haqqani said in a statement. "Instead of scoring political points at the expense of a neighboring country that is itself a victim of terrorism, it is time for India's leaders to work together with Pakistan's elected leaders in putting up a joint front against terrorism."

Arriving ashore in what police said were at least two rubber dinghies, groups of college-age men on Wednesday roamed the streets of Mumbai with automatic assault rifles and backpacks filled with ammunition and explosives, shooting up crowded places and taking hostages in hotels. One video shown again and again on television depicted the almost giddy face of a young gunman walking down the street with an AK-47 assault rifle.

The attackers struck targets in addition to the hotels and the Jewish center, including a movie theater, a hospital, a railway station, a cafe popular with foreigners and several other sites in the heart of Mumbai.

A British businessman, Rakesh Patel, who escaped the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel, told television stations that two young men with a machine gun forced 15 hostages onto the hotel roof and told them that "they wanted anyone with British or American passports."

In Washington, State Department spokesman Robert McInturff said three Americans were among those injured in the Mumbai attacks, the Associated Press reported. He said there was no indication that any U.S. citizens had been killed. The Web site of the Synchronicity Foundation, a Faber, Va.-based spiritual organization whose members were staying at one of the hotels, said two Americans in the group were feared dead and two Americans and two Canadians had been wounded by gunfire.

Five non-Indians -- an Australian, a Briton, a German, an Italian and a Japanese -- were reported killed.

"All we can say now is this is the worst, most brazen, audacious attacks in Indian history because people were shooting openly on the street," police official A.K. Sharma said. He spoke Thursday at the funeral of a police inspector who was killed while trying to stop gunmen at the train station. "It's a violent situation that's still ongoing. Mumbai remains at war."

As the sun set Thursday, some hostages unfurled "Save Us" banners from the windows of the Taj, across from the Gateway of India monument and Mumbai's waterfront. Others emerged from upper-story windows using bedsheets tied together as ladders. Earlier in the day, at least four bodies and dozens of freed hostages were taken out of the hotel -- a castlelike, 1903 landmark that was set on fire during the attacks.

India's 40 Richest

The global financial crisis has hit the subcontinent hard--the wealthiest Indians are worth 60% less than a year ago.

These are painful times for India's richest as the ongoing global turmoil drastically reshapes their fortunes. The country's once soaring stock market fell 48% in the 12 months, the rupee depreciated 24% against the dollar and gross domestic product growth is expected to slow down to 7.5%, partly owing to double-digit inflation. All of this conspired to knock 60% off the combined fortunes of the nation's 40 wealthiest. Their total net worth fell $212 billion, to $139 billion, down from $351 billion a year ago
In Pictures: India's Richest

Sort List

Rank | Name | Net Worth | Age | City

Featured

Sun Shines

Naazneen Karmali

Low-key Dilip Shanghvi has built India's most valuable drug company by taking measured risks and picking his fights carefully.

The Patient Billionaire

Richard C. Morais

Sixty-five years after his grandfather bought 3,500 acres in Mumbai, Adi Godrej is finally ready to develop it.

The Party Is Over

Naazneen Karmali

Vijay Mallya styles himself the king of good times, but can't be enjoying plummeting net worth.

The Top 20

1. Mukesh Ambani
2. Lakshmi Mittal
3. Anil Ambani
4. Sunil Mittal
5. Kushal Pal Singh
6. Shashi & Ravi Ruia
7. Azim Premji
8. Kumar Birla
9. Adi Godrej
10. Gautam Adani
11. Dilip Shanghvi
12. Savitri Jindal
13. Malvinder & Shivinder Singh
14. Anil Agarwal
15. Shiv Nadar
16. Micky Jagtiani
17. Indu Jain
18. Cyrus Poonawalla
19. Uday Kotak
20. Chandru Raheja

Complete List

NEW DELHI, India (CNN) -- India blasted into the international space race Wednesday with the successful launch of an ambitious two-year mission to study the moon's landscape.

The spacecraft carrying India's first lunar probe, Chandrayaan-1, lifts off in Sriharikota on Wednesday.

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The unmanned lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-1, or "moon craft" in ancient Sanskrit, launched at 6:20 a.m. (8:50 p.m. ET) from the Sriharikota space center in southern India.

The mission seeks high-resolution imaging of the moon's surface, especially the permanently shadowed polar regions, according to the Indian Space Research Organization. It will also search for evidence of water or ice and attempt to identify the chemical breakdown of certain lunar rocks, the group said.

Despite the numerous missions to the moon over the past 50 years, "we really don't have a good map," said Miles O'Brien, CNN chief technology and environment correspondent. "The goal is to come up with a very intricate, three-dimensional map of the moon."

The Chandrayaan-1 is carrying payloads from the United States, European Union countries Germany, Britain, Sweden and Bulgaria, and India plans to share the data from the mission with other programs, including NASA. Watch the launch of India's first lunar mission »

ISRO said on its Web site that the mission would lay the groundwork for future lunar missions and "probe the physical characteristics of the lunar surface in greater depth than previous missions by other nations."

"It will also give us a deeper understanding about the planet Earth itself or its origins," a statement on the Web site said. "Earlier missions did not come out with a full understanding of the moon and that is the reason scientists are still interested. This will lay the foundation for bigger missions and also open up new possibilities of international networking and support for planetary programs."

Until now, India's space launches have been more practical, with weather warning satellites and communiations systems, The Associated Press cited former NASA associated administrator Scott Pace as saying.

To date, only the U.S. Russia, the European Space Agency, Japan and China have sent missions to the moon, according to AP.

Critics of the mission have questioned its $80 million price tag, saying the money should have been spent by the government to improve education and fight poverty.

But, "there are scientists that would argue that there are plenty of things we don't know about the moon ... and India might have the know-how" to find answers, said CNN's Sara Sidner in New Delhi.

The United States and the Soviet Union dominated the field of lunar exploration from the late 1950s. The United States is preparing for its own mission slated for next spring -- the first U.S. lunar mission in more than a decade, according to NASA.

Soviet spacecraft were the first to fly by, land on and orbit the moon. Luna 1, launched on January 2, 1959, and sped by the moon two days later.

Luna 2 was launched on an impact mission on September 12, 1959, striking the surface two days later. Luna 9 launched on January 31, 1966, becoming the first craft to successfully land on the moon and send back data, touching down on the surface on January 31, 1966, and transmitting until February 3, 1967, when its batteries ran out.

Luna 10 was launched March 31, 1966, entered lunar orbit on April 3, and operated for 56 days.

But the United States' Apollo missions were the first manned missions to reach the moon, culminating with six missions that set down on the surface. The first, Apollo 11, left earth on July 16, 1969, and landed astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin on the lunar surface on July 20 while command module pilot Michael Collins orbited above. The astronauts returned safely to earth on July 24.

Most recently India's fellow Asian nations, China and Japan, put lunar orbiters in place. Japan launched the Kaguya orbiter in October 2007, followed by China's launch of the Chang'e mission a few weeks later. Watch what is shaping up to be a new space race »