The nearly 10 crore farmers who hold kisan credit cards (KCC) will soon be able to use their card as a deposit account and a debit card.  This will help the government scale up its financial inclusion plan quickly without relying on bank accounts alone.  KCC, which has been instrumental in faster delivery of credit to farmers, is like an overdraft account with a bank that has to be operated through a...

The Union government has cleared an external loan to finance part of the programme launched by the Ministry of Rural Development in left wing extremism-affected villages. The clearance is for a loan of $500 million from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to speed up construction of rural roads. Union Minister of Rural Development Jairam Ramesh has, in a letter, urged Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee to issue directions for negotiating and early signing...

One of the great achievements of India is our free and vibrant press. This is an accomplishment of direct relevance to the working of democracy. Authoritarianism flourishes not only by stifling opposition, but also by systematically suppressing information. The survival and flowering of Indian democracy owes a great deal to the freedom and vigour of our press. There are so many occasions when, sitting even in Europe or in America,...

-PTI In a relief to Kerala chief minister Oommen Chandy, a vigilance probe has found he had no role in the palmolein import corruption case in the early 1990s when he was finance minister in the then UDF ministry headed by late Congress veteran K Karunakaran. In its report filed in a special court on Saturday, Vigilance and Anti-corruption Bureau (VACB) said its investigation did not come across any proof that suggested Chandy...

In a move that would usher in greater transparency, the Central Information Commission (CIC) ordered that legal opinion sought internally by the government can be made public.   The decision is also significant because it could compound the political problems of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), which is impacted by a series of allegations of corruption, some of which have been revealed through filing of queries under Right to Information (RTI). The...