-The Times of India MUMBAI: Data collected by Reserve Bank of India over a period of one year blows the lid off what goes as loan classification in banks. In a presentation at the annual bankers' conference, RBI deputy governor K C Chakrabarty showed how banks have sacrificed over Rs 1 lakh crore by writing off bad loans to corporates, which is much higher than Union finance minister P Chidambaram's farm...

-The Indian Express For the Bharatiya Mahila Bank, the country's first pan-India national women's bank, it is a humble rural cooperative women's venture in Maharashtra that has provided the critical input to succeed: How to lend to women who do not have collateral to back their loans. Chetna V Sinha, founder and chairperson of Mann Deshi Mahila Sahakari Bank, explained that this is the prime weakness in giving loans to women. The...

-The Asian Age Reserve Bank deputy governor K.C. Chakraborty has finally set the record straight on what is well known in left-wing development circles: that Corporate India's loans waived by banks are more (over Rs. 1 lakh crore in the past 13 years) than farm loans to the tune of Rs. 60,000 crores written off under the Debt Waiver and Debt Relief Scheme. More revealing is that medium and large units have...

-The Telegraph Thiruvananthapuram: The Centre's move to implement an ecology panel's report on conservation of the Western Ghats has provoked a call for a 48-hour civil disobedience agitation by the Catholic Church in Kerala, starting Sunday midnight. The Church claims the K. Kasturirangan report, notified on Wednesday, will hit the livelihoods of farmers living in the "high ranges" - foothill areas bordering the forests - and force them to relocate. Green activists deny...

-The Hindustan Times Prices of almost all everyday products and services - from food to footwear and movie tickets to medicines - saw a sharp rise in October, pushing retail inflation to 10.09%, the highest in seven months. Costlier onions and tomatoes saw retail inflation - a measure of prices that are asked of you at a shop - cross the double-digit mark for the first time in seven months, indicating Indians...