-ThePrint.in The likelihood of financial distress caused by the 2nd wave is much higher & it could lead to more outright sales of gold, unlike in 2020, when people chose to take out loans against gold. Mumbai: Paul Fernandes, a 50-year-old waiter in India, last year took out a loan using his gold as collateral to pay for his children’s education after losing his job on a cruise liner. This year, he...

-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...

-RuralIndiaOnline.org Poor public infrastructure, unaffordable private medical care and limited access to the state health insurance scheme are pushing Covid patients and their families into long-term debt in Marathwada  Eight days after testing positive for Covid-19, Ramling Sanap died in the hospital where he was being treated for the infection. But it wasn’t the virus that killed him. A few hours before he died, Ramling, 40, had phoned his wife, Rajubai, from the...

Quite often it is argued by mainstream economists that a sizeable chunk of the Union Budget every year is wasted because the Government spends that on food and fertiliser subsidies. The burgeoning size of these two subsidies relative to the entire budget as well as the gross domestic product (GDP) is often used to build the argument that economic as well as environmental sustainability of the country is at stake...

-Livemint.com The Union government has finally stepped on the gas when it comes to spending. But after a temporary splurge in the rest of this fiscal year, the finance ministry will tighten its purse strings to bring down debt levels, the budget numbers suggest Even as countries across the world raised spending aggressively to counter the economic impact of the covid-19 pandemic, India had remained an outlier. Throughout the pandemic, the finance...