-Outlook In the last two decades, more than 300,000 farmers have ended their lives. What can be done? Indian agriculture is important as it feeds an estimated 1.3 billion population of the country and is also burdened with the responsibility of providing livelihoods to 60 per cent of the people — 780 million people. No foreign country can produce this mammoth quantity of food and supply to India nor any sector...

-Business Standard While the task force did not categorically say which methodology should be adopted, it said it would make its recommendation within six months after consulting all stakeholders including states Keeping the issue of poverty line open, a task force of NITI Aayog has questioned the possibility of substituting the line with the data on deprivation given by the socio economic and caste census (SECC). While the task force did not...

-BBC Kalawati Devi Rawat is known as the woman who brought electricity to her remote village in the hills of the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, writes BBC Hindi's Salman Ravi. It was the early 1980s and she had just been married and moved to Bacher village to live with her husband. The village had no electricity and she found life tough once it got dark in the hills. One day, she led a...

-The Indian Express In Marathwada’s worst-hit districts of Beed, Osmanabad and Latur, households now have an uncompromising priority list of expenses as an economy hit by years of near-total crop failure goes into a tailspin. Beed/ Osmanabad: About 65 kilometres from the cracked earth that was once their source of income, Mandakini Mujmule, in her forties, and her daughter Anita, 21, have spent 16 days in Beed city’s government hospital. Mandakini has...

-The Hindu Business Line MFIs are unable to address the needs of self-help groups. They have been hit by the falling growth of SHGs There has been a long-standing debate on the ability and effectiveness of the formal banking system as a vehicle for financial inclusion. The thrust has been to increase the number of small banks, as they play a very important role in the supply of credit to small business...