-IPS News LUDHIANA: Long-term agricultural growth in India is slowing down. The lands that saw remarkable increases in productivity in the 1970s and 80s, thanks to the technology rolled out as part of the first “Green Revolution”, are not yielding the same results today. India still has the second highest number of undernourished people in the world. To confront this problem, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called for a Second Green Revolution on Indian...

-The Hindu Banks continue denying loans to low-income groups, insisting on sticking to a standard EMI route even though they are dealing with a complex social issue. In July 2012, Pradeep Kumar, a 36-year-old resident of Ladpur, a shanty town that sits on the north-western periphery of Delhi, applied for an employment loan at the magistrate’s office in Kanjawala district. Under the Pradhan Mantri Rozgar Yojana or PMRY — a funding policy...

-IndiaSpend.com More than 70 million rural households face some form of exclusion, either from assets or socio-economic benefits, according to data released by the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) survey last week. As many as 833 million Indians, or 69% of the population, live in rural areas. The SECC report comes at a time when global credit rating agencies, such as Moody’s, have warned that slow growth in rural India may cripple the...

-Outlook Despite claims, closer scrutiny of the data shows that the actual farmers are not getting enough support. There are tall claims on the farm credit front while there has not been any let up in the agrarian crisis, indicated chiefly by the continued farmers' suicides in different parts of the country. Yes, there is enough evidence for the government to show a heavy flow of credit to the farmers through...

-The Hindu Startling facts emerge from census; Maharashtra tops the list The practice of manual scavenging, officially banned since decades in India, continues with impunity in several States. The latest Socio-Economic Caste Census data released on July 3 reveals that 1, 80, 657 households are engaged in this degrading work for a livelihood. Maharashtra, with 63,713, tops the list with the largest number of manual scavenger households, followed by Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh,...