-Down to Earth Andhra, Telangana have highest percentage of agricultural households under debt; Average debt: Rs 2.45 lakh in Andhra More than half of India’s agricultural households were in debt, with an average outstanding of Rs 74,121, according to the latest ‘Situation Assessment of Agricultural Households and Land Holdings of Households in Rural India, 2019’ released September 10, 2021. The percentage of households in debt, however, reduced slightly from 51.9 per cent as...
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RBI proposal to loosen lending norms for private players a catastrophe in the making -Rana Mitra
-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...
More »Rajapaksa’s eco-extremism spells doom for Sri Lankan agriculture and rural livelihoods -R Ramakumar
-Foundation of Agrarian Studies An influential section of Sri Lankan agricultural economists and scientists has deplored the recent course change in the country’s agricultural policy made by the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government. The decision by the government to ban the use and import of chemical fertilisers and pesticides in pursuit of a “100 per cent organic food producer” status for Sri Lanka has already had disastrous consequences for the economy of the...
More »1.5 million people lost jobs in August as unemployment rises -Prashant K Nanda
-Hindustan Times According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, the number of the employed fell from 399.38 million in July to 397.78 million in August, with nearly 1.3 million job losses in rural India alone. Over 1.5 million people from both the formal and informal sectors lost their jobs in August, reversing some of the gains made in July, as the unemployment rate rose in rural and urban India. According to the...
More »NREGA is crucial to rural India in 2021 -Avani Kapur, Harish Damodaran and Yamini Aiyar
-IDROnline.org While it claims to be a demand-based scheme with an elastic budget, NREGA’s failure to support the Rural Economy in 2021 indicates otherwise. A comparison of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) demand and supply of work between the first quarter of financial year (FY) 2020, when the national lockdown was in place and the first quarter of FY 2021 when the second wave was at its peak offers...
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