Time magazine picked him as one of 100 people shaping our world. Today, he’s held responsible for bringing an exciting, inspirational business into disrepute. Oh, and his wife says he beat her and snatched their son. There could not be a more controversial torchbearer than Vikram Akula for an industry as quintessentially Indian as microfinance, the business of providing the poor with loans, as small as R5,000, secured not with...

It is two weeks now that the state cotton federation has launched procurement but not a single farmer has turned up to sell cotton at its collection centres because of the huge gap between minimum support price and the open market rates. But private traders are now being accused of cartelising in order to pull down prices as it has become a buyers` market. Nearly half a dozen incidents of clashes...

Gujarat government has calculated that the state's farmers suffered losses to the tune of Rs 4,000 crore last year as a result of export restrictions imposed by the Government of India on raw cotton. "Thanks to the restrictions, Gujarat's farmers, who exported most of the raw cotton being produced in the state, were forced to sell the commodity to the yarn mills of south India at a price which is...

Amid the heat and dust over high interest rates charged by microfinance institutions and reports of coercive recovery methods by some lenders in Andhra Pradesh, MFIs in eastern India are trying to strike a more cordial note with borrowers by lowering interest rates. At least three MFIs based out of Kolkata are on the verge of slashing lending rates by nearly 500 basis points to 19.1% per annum, on reducing balance...

The microfinance bubble has burst. The AP government ordinance, the AP oppositionfs campaign asking borrowers not to repay and the sheer public hostility towards MFIs . all these have put the brakes on MFI activities for now. We need to rethink the role of MFIs in the rural economy . In order to do so, we must first grasp some of the myths on which the MFI sector has rested...