-The Times of India BANGALORE: Holders of fixed deposits have been earning a negative return in real terms for most of the preceding five years, thanks to inflation outstripping interest rates. To make matters worse, depositors continue to be taxed on this nominal income. Although bank fixed deposits have never been tax friendly, the level of compliance has been sketchy. But compliance is slowly getting stricter. In the past, RBI norms required banks...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: Large numbers of poor and vulnerable are exposed to risks and unexpected difficulties like unemployment, ill health, and natural disasters, an Asian Development Bank ( ADB) study says, because of lack of adequate social protection systems in many fast-growing middle-income countries in Asia and the Pacific. The Social Protection Index: Assessing Results for Asia and the Pacific-released on Wednesday gives India a score of 0.051, below most...

-The Indian Express The latest NSSO data also underlines the increasing absence of women from the labour market Every time results from one of the "thick" rounds of the National Sample Survey come out, we get into a feeding frenzy, trying to slice and dice the statistics for changes since the previous round. Since NSS large rounds are typically conducted every five years, there is perhaps some sense to it, particularly when...

-Down to Earth About nine million women went out of the job market in the rural areas between 2009-10 and 2011-12, a grim facet of the employment crisis in the countryside The dismal trend in India's jobless growth story was reinforced when the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) of the ministry of statistics and programme implementation released the highlights of its 68th round of its surveys, conducted from July 2011 to June...

-The Economic Times Over the last decade the UPA government has tried to reduce poverty by legislating a regime of rights accompanied by the national rural employment guarantee (NREG) programme -spending Rs 1,70,000 crore on this strategy. This strategy would have been fine if the transformation of India from a strong currency, high growth and low inflation economy to aweak currency, low growth and high inflation economy had been accompanied by a...