The Economic Offences Wing of the Central Bureau of Investigation has unearthed a multimillion-rupee bribery scam and arrested top officials of public sector banks and financial institutions, including the Chief Executive Officer of the Life Insurance Corporation Housing Finance Limited. On Tuesday, the CBI conducted raids in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Jaipur, Kolkata and Jalandhar and seized some documents. “Five separate cases have been registered,” Joint Director P. Kandaswamy told a press...

United Nations agencies today launched new international guidelines aimed at helping to protect health workers who provide care to people infected with HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (TB) from becoming infected themselves in the course of their work. The guidelines, drafted by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), are designed to help doctors, nurses and midwives, pharmacists and laboratory technicians, as...

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...

Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said Friday he intends to regulate but not strangle the microfinance industry, which is in crisis because of new regulations and political attacks in its biggest Indian market, the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. In comments at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi, Mr. Mukherjee said a committee of the Reserve Bank of India is looking at all aspects of microfinance, which has come...

In a small pastoral vand (hamlet) in Kutch, Gujarat, 10 year old Ramu wakes up at five in the morning. His mother serves him a hasty breakfast of bajra rotis after which he is packed off to the pasturelands surrounding their small hamlet to graze the family's buffaloes. Since his village does not have a working school, grazing the livestock is gainful employment from the point of view of Ramu's...