-The Indian Express The Finance Ministry directed smaller PSBs to cut their corporate loan exposure to 25 per cent of their risk-weighted assets over the medium term and focus more on retail lending. Corporate loans corner the lion’s share of rising bad loans in public sector banks while retail loans have a far superior track record when it comes to timely repayment, according to the latest available Reserve Bank of India...

-Livemint.com Farmers continue to be vulnerable to frequent episodes of losses that neither the state nor the markets have been able to mitigate The dramatic long march to Mumbai involving thousands of distressed farmers on 12 March is a remarkable feat of peaceful protest against the state, given its apathy towards farmers’ distress as well as its failures in safeguarding tribal land rights. However, what is surprisingly missing in this poignant narrative...

-Hindustan Times The murder of a woman in Alwar points to India’s most shockingly under-reported story on why nearly 200 lakh women have quit jobs All Usha Devi wanted was to give her kids a good education. The wife of a construction worker knew that her husband’s income was not enough to educate her children, Tanuja, 15, and Dheeraj, 10, and, so, she took a job at a plastic factory. Not everyone was...

-The Hindu Why India is the only Bt cotton-growing country facing the problem of pink bollworm infestation Earlier this month, the government cut royalties that local seed companies pay to Monsanto, for the second time in two years. This follows previous attempts to defang Monsanto. In February, for instance, the anti-trust regulator, the Competition Commission of India, decided to probe into anti-competitive practices by Monsanto. At the centre of all this is...

-The Indian Express Forest Rights Act is not an obstacle to growth. Its non-implementation will be politically counter-productive. The farmers’ and forest dwellers’ march from Nashik to Mumbai, and the Maharashtra government’s decision to approve most of their demands within the next six months, has established the fact that land and forest rights are going to be determining factors for political establishments across India. The protest in Mumbai tells us that a...