-The Hindu Business Line A majority of them take loans from moneylenders and for non-agricultural needs A few years ago when Chayatai Parkhi’s husband Ashok ended his life as he was unable to pay debt taken from banks and moneylenders, Chayatai was forced to take another loan from a moneylender to perform a series of religious rites after the cremation of her husband. Ashok had taken a loan for his daughter’s marriage...

-The Hindu Business Line From easing access to credit to leveraging the PLI scheme, MSMEs can tap into a range of policy initiatives In November 2021 the government announced the Special Credit Linked Capital Subsidy Scheme for the MSMEs (Micro Small and Medium Enterprises) in the services sector. The scheme has a provision of 25 per cent capital subsidy for procurement of service equipment through Institutional Credit to the SMEs for advancement...

The Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households and Land and Livestock Holdings of Households in Rural India (NSS 77th Round), which was released recently, informs one about farm households' income in the crop year 2018-19 and indebtedness in 2019 (as on the date of survey), among other things. Prior to the recent report, Land and Livestock Holding Surveys (LHS) and Situation Assessment Survey (SAS) of Agricultural Households used to be...

-Frontline.thehindu.com The RBI’s proposal to loosen regulations for private lenders in the microfinance space will have disastrous consequences for the poor, especially women in rural areas. Microfinance, a category of financial services aimed at serving people from low-income households who lack access to conventional banking credit and services, was originally designed by international finance capital institutions such as the World Bank as an alternative to providing direct concessional credit to the poor—which...

The recently released quarterly Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) data broadly confirms the dip in employment and jobs during the countrywide lockdown period, followed by a certain degree of recovery in the post-lockdown months last year as have been indicated by various survey-based studies and research papers. The quarterly bulletin on PLFS provides data on key employment and unemployment indicators i.e. Unemployment Rate (UR), Worker Population Ratio (WPR) and Labour...