Microcredit is losing its halo in many developing countries. Microcredit was once extolled by world leaders like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as a powerful tool that could help eliminate poverty, through loans as small as $50 to cowherds, basket weavers and other poor people for starting or expanding businesses. But now microloans have prompted political hostility in Bangladesh, India, Nicaragua and other developing countries. In December, the prime minister of...

Four tribespeople have died in violence on the border of the north-eastern Indian states of Assam and Meghalaya. Thousands of people have been displaced in the clashes between the Rabha and Garo tribes in the past 24 hours. An indefinite curfew has been imposed on the area since midnight, but tension remained high, police said. Trouble has been brewing in the Krishnai area since Rabhas and Garos clashed on Christmas Day after a...

If home minister P Chidambaram’s recent letter to West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee is any indication, it has taken the Union home ministry seven years to realise that arming civilians to fight Naxalites is a bad idea. How much longer will it take for them to realise that the current paramilitary-based approach in Chhattisgarh is similarly bound to fail? From 2003 onwards, the home ministry has followed a policy of...

The Indian government should drop sedition cases against rights activists Binayak Sen, Arundhati Roy, and others, the Human Rights Watch said Thursday. The international body has also urged the Indian parliament to repeal the colonial-era sedition law, as it has been used by the authorities to 'silence Peaceful political dissent'. The authorities have pursued sedition charges against Peaceful activists, despite a Supreme Court ruling that prosecution under the sedition law requires incitement...

The Supreme Court today stayed a Delhi High Court order that had refused to quash a criminal case slapped against political commentator Ashish Nandy for an article on the Gujarat riots. It also issued notices to the Gujarat government on an appeal filed by Nandy against the high court order that dismissed his plea for quashing the case registered against. The high court had asked Nandy to defend himself in a lower...