-The Telegraph More than half of the country's small and marginal farmers continue to be left out of the ambit of formal finance A recent report by the Reserve Bank of India found that despite a plethora of schemes aimed at financial inclusion, only 40.9 per cent of small and marginal farmers have so far been covered by the banking system. Small and marginal farmers are defined as those with operational land...

-The Hindu Business Line The government must simplify and rationalise GST, kickstart rural consumption, revive agriculture and tackle the lack of credit for capital creation, says former PM Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, an eminent economist himself, feels that the Narendra Modi-led government needs to come out of its habit of headline management and address the economic challenges which the country is facing today. “We cannot afford to deny that India is facing...

-The Indian Express India’s employment crisis calls for more government expenditure in education, adequate training. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his recent Independence Day speech, said, “We need to worry about population explosion”. These words stand in stark contrast to his previous references to India’s demographic dividend where the country’s population was seen as an asset. This shift reflects a new awareness, according to which demography brings a dividend only if...

-IANS * Manmohan Singh said India has the potential to grow at a much faster rate, but the all-round mismanagement by the Modi govt has resulted in this slowdown * The former PM said over 3.5 lakh jobs had been lost in the automobile sector alone, he claimed similar large-scale job losses in the Informal sector New Delhi: Days after the finance ministry reported contraction in the GDP growth, former prime minister Manmohan...

-The Hindu The recent PLFS data, which show a historic decline in manufacturing employment, make one fact plain — India desperately needs a comprehensive industrial policy, absent since 1991 The Union Budget suggests that the government has not recognised the need to create more manufacturing jobs. For the first time ever, manufacturing jobs fell in absolute terms between 2011-12 and 2017-18, to quote the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) of the National...