India’s rapidly growing private microcredit industry faces imminent collapse as almost all borrowers in one of India’s largest states have stopped repaying their loans, egged on by politicians who accuse the industry of earning outsize profits on the backs of the poor. The crisis has been building for weeks, but has now reached a critical stage. Indian banks, which put up about 80 percent of the money that the companies...

While the Yeddyurappa-led BJP government in Karnataka is embroiled in a land scam, farmers are up in arms against the acquisition of their lands for industrial use in Mysore district. They have alleged that the government was acquiring 25,000 acres of land. Dismissing their allegation, authorities have come out with a statement saying that they were acquiring 8,520 acres in the district as a mutual consent of farmers. The clarification has come...

A growing shortage of farm hands and smaller land holdings are forcing many farmers to mechanise their farms, allowing multinational agri implement companies to tap into Indian market. A 2006 study by consulting firm Zinnov said that the agri equipment market in India would grow at a compounded rate of 5% between 2006 and 2010 to touch $8 billion. Today, a large number of Chinese, Japanese, American and Italian firms has...

Time magazine picked him as one of 100 people shaping our world. Today, he’s held responsible for bringing an exciting, inspirational business into disrepute. Oh, and his wife says he beat her and snatched their son. There could not be a more controversial torchbearer than Vikram Akula for an industry as quintessentially Indian as microfinance, the business of providing the poor with loans, as small as R5,000, secured not with...

At least 29 of the 66 migrants crushed to death in east Delhi when a building collapsed on Monday night hailed from Bengal. The figure signposts the exodus of an abandoned generation and the inability of a state to retain its young or equip them for a better life elsewhere. The death of so many Bengalis has brought out in the open troubling issues that policymakers — both in the state...