The poster boy of microfinance is now seeking some anonymity. In Andhra Pradesh, the epicentre of the worst crisis faced by microfinance in India, SKS Microfinance is playing down its identity and going into preservation mode. At its modest office in a residential colony in Warangal district, India’s largest microfinance company has taken down its board. At its head office in upmarket Begumpet in Hyderabad, it hung a cloth mesh...

Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...

Karunanidhi makes announcement at inauguration of Anna Centenary Library Five boiled eggs a week will hereafter be given to students covered under the nutritious meal programme, Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi announced on Wednesday. At present, three eggs are given to the students — on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays — every week. Henceforth, eggs would be given on five working days of schools a week, the Chief Minister said, declaring open the Anna...

Long before they gained currency as the real-life counterparts of the Na'vis portrayed by Hollywood blockbuster "Avatar", the author of the Vedanta verdict — Justice S H Kapadia — had made clear about how he saw the Dongaria Kondhs, who are officially classified as "primitive tribal group". Kapadia, now chief justice of India, described this tribe from Orissa as a people "living on grass". His unflattering, almost dismissive description came...

The area under turmeric cultivation in Erode district has almost doubled this year because of the high price it fetches in the market. Farmers have cultivated turmeric in over 9,500 hectares of land till date. Normally turmeric is cultivated in about 5,000 to 6,000 hectares in the district. Cultivation “The price of the yellow spice has been hovering around Rs. 15,000 a quintal for the last few months. This has encouraged farmers to...