-ThePrint.in West Bengal and Rajasthan have remarkably improved the delivery of basic services to their poorest 20% population between 2005-06 and 2015-16, NFHS data show. The lives of asset poor in India’s major states, as shown in an earlier article, have improved between 2005-06 and 2015-16 in terms of owning common durables. Asset poor are defined as the bottom 20 per cent of a state’s population in terms of durable asset ownership. It...
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How India's Financial Inclusion Infrastructure Failed During the Pandemic -Isabelle Guérin, Nithya Joseph and G Venkatasubramanian
-TheWire.in Despite the fact that India's financial inclusion infrastructure has a complex mix of self-help groups and small private banks offering credit to the poor, it has failed to deliver during the pandemic. When the pandemic struck, policymakers and prominent economists across the world called for financial infrastructures to be strengthened. They argued this would support the efficient channeling of relief through cash transfers or cheap loans. India was no exception to...
More »Fiscal transparency jacks up ‘expenditure’ numbers in the Union Budget 2021-22
In order to understand why the Union Budget 2021-22 is being termed as ‘transparent’, it has to be read simultaneously with the 15th Finance Commission Main Report for 2021-26. But first, let us discuss 'fertilizer subsidy'. The budget documents for Union Budget 2021-22 show that the spending on ‘fertilizer subsidy’ was slashed from Rs. 1,33,947 crore in 2020-21 (revised estimate) to Rs. 79,530 crore in 2021-22 (budget estimate). However, the budgetary...
More »In rural India, over-reliance on digital technology has worsen financial exclusion -Rajendran Narayanan and Sakina Dhorajiwala
-The Indian Express A technological intervention must have a governance framework in which protection of rights must be fundamental and which provides more choices to the marginalised. Remember the early days of the internet, when it took several minutes to connect to the web through a dial-in modem? Or when you had to wait in line at an STD booth to make an outstation call? Since then, we have made massive strides...
More »Has personal loans seen a rebound ahead of the festive season? The answer is in the negative
Just before Dhanteras and Diwali this year, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) released the November edition of its monthly bulletin. The latest RBI Monthly Bulletin says that the GDP has contracted by -8.6 percent in the second quarter of fiscal year 2020-21 (i.e. July-September, 2020) as compared to the gross domestic product (GDP) during the corresponding period last year. It may be noted that India’s GDP shrunk by -23.9...
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