Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have blamed the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) for shortage of labour, which has led to increase in input cost of the products and eating into profit margins. "Now a days there is scarcity of labourers by 25 to 30 percent in SMEs. There is a high percentage of unskilled labour, which forms the core of employee recruitment in the local small and...

Expressing dissatisfaction with the report of the Central Empowered Committee (CEC) on 99 mining leases in Karnataka, the Supreme Court on Friday set up a new team to conduct a fresh survey and to demarcate the boundaries of these leases in the Bellary-Hospet forest region. A Forest Bench comprising Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia and Justices Aftab Alam and K.S. Radhakrishnan made it clear that after the survey if illegal mining or...

Procurement of wheat for the public distribution system on Friday crossed the last year's level although it remained lower in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, compared to the corresponding period last year, due to late arrival or delayed reporting. As per the latest data released by the Centre, the Food Corporation of India and State agencies had procured 20.92 million tonnes of wheat compared to 20.61 million tonnes procured last year in...

Bangladesh's highest court on Thursday upheld the government's decision to remove Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus from his pioneering small loan agency Grameen Bank. The ruling ends his decades of leadership at the bank he set up to lend money to the poor. A panel led by Chief Justice A B M Khairul Haque said the appeal to keep Yunus as managing director of the bank is dismissed. Yunus has said his removal was...

Food inflation fell to 8.53 per cent for the week ended April 23 on the back of fall in prices of pulses, reversing the upward trend seen in the previous fortnight. Food inflation in the previous week was 8.76 per cent. The latest numbers are likely to come as a relief to the government and the RBI, especially at a time when the central bank's monetary policy for the fiscal, released...