NIIRA RADIA — owner of PR company Vaishnavi Communications, among others — is not merely a fixer in the old sense of the word. She is a thermometer reading for a very ill society. In April this year, a clutch of mysterious documents had made their way to several media houses. At face value the documents seemed a synopsis of phone conversations between Niira — a powerful lobbyist for Mukesh...

The SKS IPO and the Andhra Pradesh ordinance have suddenly changed everything. Will it be the death knell or will it usher in a reformed and healthy industry? There are three basic facts about micro-finance in India. First, most of what is described as micro-finance industry is actually micro-loans. There is hardly any provision of micro-savings, micro-investments, micro-insurance or micro-pensions. This is mostly because of regulatory reasons, i.e. accepting money...

Given the mind-boggling figures thrown up by the CAG report on the 2G scam, the gains seem rather modest. But in the year gone by, former telecom minister A Raja's finances have shown a healthy growth with regard to both income and investments. His political career may be headed south, but Raja's finances are in the pink of health. Not only has his personal income increased from Rs 11.47 lakh to...

India’s rapidly growing private microcredit industry faces imminent collapse as almost all borrowers in one of India’s largest states have stopped repaying their loans, egged on by politicians who accuse the industry of earning outsize profits on the backs of the poor. The crisis has been building for weeks, but has now reached a critical stage. Indian banks, which put up about 80 percent of the money that the companies...

Ajit Kumar Singh loves driving his father CP Singh’s brand new Mahindra Xylo on the potholed roads much more used to tractors carrying sugarcane in Ashokpur Tikia village of Gonda district in Uttar Pradesh. “It takes to the road in these interior regions much easily than the humble Alto we had earlier,” says the 20-year-old law student at the local degree college in Gonda, tapping his fingers on the freshly washed...