-The Hindu The government on Monday proposed the setting up of a parliamentary panel to go into the issue of farmer suicides in the wake of contradictory figures emerging from the States and the Union Home Ministry's National Crime Records Bureau. The suggestion came after the government was cornered in the Rajya Sabha, during the reply to the debate on the agrarian crisis, leading to two quick adjournments and a walkout by...

Chances of a single answer to two opposing questions on the RTI Act means there is something to it which the rule-books don’t tell you about—but you can bowl googlies to them, too, when the system expects you to hold a straight bat to their bouncers Here is a single answer to two diametrically opposite questions—“Yes, you can file an application under the Right to Information Act of India 2005 (RTI...

It will provide credit risk guarantee to banks on the loans Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday announced that the Centre was considering setting up a credit risk guarantee fund with a corpus of Rs. 1,000 crore, to start with, to encourage banks to lend to the poor for housing. Emphasising that developing housing for the poor was critical for sustainable urban development, he said: “To encourage banks to lend in significant...

-IANS The government is considering creating a corpus fund of Rs.1,000 crore ($18.7 million) in the current fiscal that would encourage banks to give housing loans in 'significant volumes' to the urban poor, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said Tuesday. Addressing a conference on the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) here, Manmohan Singh said the corpus of Rs.1,000 would be set aside to create a credit risk guarantee fund that could...

Lack of adequate credit - the lifeblood for any company is threatening to derail fledgling attempts by hundreds of dalit entrepreneurs to overcome deep socio-economic barriers and break into mainstream business.  Without credit, such entrepreneurs would also struggle to cash-in on the Rs 7,000-crore business opportunity opened up by the central government's new dalit-friendly sourcing plan, unveiled last month.  Credit disbursements to dalit entrepreneurs through 20-odd schemes run by the Ministry of...