Fifty thousand jobs? The U.S. economy has lost that many every week, on average, for a straight 140 weeks since December 2007. Now that the media's gush and drool over the Obama visit has run dry — thanks to other far more interesting events — it might be worth looking at a couple of ‘outcomes' that much of our media seemed pretty taken with.‘Twenty deals worth 10 billion dollars that create...

Close on the heels of the recent controversy surrounding over the microfinance institutions, Karnataka government has decided to foray into the micro finance business with an initial corpus of Rs 500 crore. With this, Karnataka will join the league of Andhra Pradesh to have its own state-funded microfinance institution. The government plans to lend at the rate of 4 per cent interest per annum to unorganised sector workers. “There are about 3.5...

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...

Writes to Azad expressing concern over its inclusion in public health programme The Union government's decision to allow the use of injectable contraceptives, as part of the public health programme in the country, would be a harmful step that will affect the health of women, Member of Parliament and Communist Party of India (Marxist) Polit Bureau member Brinda Karat has said. In a letter to the Union Health and Family Welfare Minister...

The rural development ministry has expressed its reservations on linking wages paid under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) with minimum wages mandated by states for farm labour. In an internal note, which was reviewed by Mint, the ministry said such a step could lead to the states upwardly revising minimum wages for farm labour, an increased burden that the Central government then would have to bear. The ministry,...