-AP The microfinance industry pursued a path of rapid business growth in recent years; two investigations now link it to debtor suicides   First they were stripped of their utensils, furniture, mobile phones, television sets, ration cards and heirloom gold jewellery. Then, some of them drank pesticide. One woman threw herself into a pond. Another jumped into a well with her children. Sometimes, the debt collectors watched nearby. More than 200 poor, debt-ridden residents of...

The Supreme Court today described the midnight crackdown on Baba Ramdev’s supporters at Ramlila Maidan last summer as a glaring example of the “trust deficit” between the government and the people, and blamed both the police and the Baba for neglecting the common man caught in the brick-batting between them.   The people who were “rudely” woken up at the maidan became the “ultimate sufferers” of the showdown in the dark between...

 The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) is giving final touches to two reports where it has pointed out anomalies in allocation of funds under the centrally-runJNNURM scheme and UPA government's debt waiver to farmers in 2008, something the opposition may use as a stick to beat the government during the budget session.  In the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), the CAG, sources said, is reviewing how central funds were...

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state...

-PTI   All 21 websites, including Google and Facebook, summoned earlier by a magisterial court, are liable to face prosecution for being privy to the hosting of inflammatory contents on their webpages, the Delhi High Court was told today.  The counsel for one Vinay Rai, who had moved the trial court for prosecution of various websites, including social networking sites and web search engines, argued before a bench of Justice Suresh Kait that...