Even as the media celebrate the Mercedes Benz deal in the Marathwada region as a sign of “rural resurgence,” the latest data show that 17,368 farmers killed themselves in the year of the “resurgence.” When businessmen from Aurangabad in the backward Marathwada region bought 150 Mercedes Benz luxury cars worth Rs. 65 crore at one go in October, it grabbed media attention. The top public sector bank, State Bank of India,...

In response to growing frustration that the U.N. climate negotiations are not producing real-world results, individual nations, states and business are cobbling together patchwork solutions to preserve forests, produce clean energy and scrub pollution from the air.Under this new approach, businesses in California will offset their greenhouse gas emissions by funding tropical forest preservation in Mexico and Brazil; Japan will help pay for nuclear power plants in developing nations; and...

The poster boy of microfinance is now seeking some anonymity. In Andhra Pradesh, the epicentre of the worst crisis faced by microfinance in India, SKS Microfinance is playing down its identity and going into preservation mode. At its modest office in a residential colony in Warangal district, India’s largest microfinance company has taken down its board. At its head office in upmarket Begumpet in Hyderabad, it hung a cloth mesh...

The term “bottom of the pyramid” (BOP), coined by the late C K Prahalad, became wildly attractive in the early noughties, in part because the concept, which suggests that it is possible and legit to make money from the poor, provided a leavening justification for the animal spirits of capitalism in poor countries like India and China with their growing list of Forbes billionaires. On the verge of the second decade...

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, since 2003, one Indian farmer has committed suicide every 30 minutes. In 2008, 16,196 farmers took their own lives, bringing the total number of farmer suicides in India between 1997 and 2008 to 199,132. (Significantly, P. Sainath is of the opinion that like all government data, these figures too are unreliable. For when women farmhands kill themselves, their deaths are not enlisted as...