-The Telegraph Nagpur: A special investigation team will probe the alleged harassment of poor women borrowers in Maharashtra by loan recovery agents of micro-finance institutions, the state government announced today after month-long street protests and an Assembly debate. Junior home minister Deepak Kesarkar assured an agitated Assembly that the state was considering a law similar to one Andhra Pradesh had enacted in 2011 to regulate the MFIs' lending and loan recovery practices. About...

-The Hindu Business Line Sowing of rice, coarse cereals continues to be lower than last year New Delhi: An increase in sowing of pulses has pulled up total sowing in the ongoing Rabi season so far to 519.27 lakh hectare, which is marginally above the previous five-years’ average acreage (normal of corresponding weak) of 517.45 lakh hectare. Compared with the acreage last year, which was a drought year, sowing till December 16 is...

-NDTV Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh: The cash crunch in the aftermath of the government's ban on Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 notes is bad enough in metros with block-long queues. But how bad is it in the small towns of India? Deep in eastern Uttar Pradesh, in Vindhyachal and Mirzapur, NDTV did a reality check. And the results were staggering. The journey started at 9 am, outside the ICICI bank ATM in the...

-Scroll.in Panchayats have no funds to hire and pay hordes of workers forced to return home from cities. Demonetisation has exposed the fragile state of the government’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. In Uttar Pradesh, in particular, an ever-burgeoning army of migrant labourers returning to their villages for lack of work in the cities, as a direct result of the cash crisis, has led to a mad scramble for employment...

-Hindustan Times Plight of the migrants: Jobless labourers return home after demonetisation Twenty-three-year-old Avinash Kumar is planning to postpone his sister’s marriage. The money he had saved, working at a sweatshop in New Delhi’s Mongolpuri, is all but gone. Kumar lost his job in about two weeks from the time Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a ban on Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, in a move that he termed as the biggest-ever...