Sitting on a huge debt burden of close to Rs 2 lakh crore, West Bengal government's finances are the worst among five highly-indebted states in the country, a noted economist attached with the Indian Statistical Institute here has said. "Revenue deficit of the state is the highest among the five highly-indebted states of UP, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat," Abhirup Sarkar, the economist, told PTI. He said that for the...

The government proposes to introduce a bill to regulate microfinance institutions (MFIs), accused of aggressive loan recovery practices, minister of state for finance Namo Narain Meena said on Tuesday. The move follows tight scrutiny of the fast-growing, largely unregulated, small loans sector after fears of large-scale defaults due to high interest rates and reports of suicides due to mounting debt. “The Department of Financial Services proposes to introduce the Micro Finance (Development...

More than 1.79 crore households across the country have been provided employment under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) this year, the Government said today. As of June 30, a total of 179,43,189 families in the country have been provided employment under MGNREGS , Minister of State for Rural Development Pradeep Jain said in a written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha. According to the sate-wise data presented...

The SKS IPO and the Andhra Pradesh ordinance have suddenly changed everything. Will it be the death knell or will it usher in a reformed and healthy industry? There are three basic facts about micro-finance in India. First, most of what is described as micro-finance industry is actually micro-loans. There is hardly any provision of micro-savings, micro-investments, micro-insurance or micro-pensions. This is mostly because of regulatory reasons, i.e. accepting money...

Yaga Venugopal Reddy , former Reserve Bank of India governor credited with saving the nation’s financial system from the 2008 meltdown, has said what many finance experts believed, but did not have the courage to admit publicly: microfinance is India’s subprime. “Ultimately, it’s something like subprime lending,” Mr Reddy told ET in an interview ahead of his book release. “The same incentives are operating here... it was securitisation and derivatives that...