The Centre is planning to impose a ceiling of 18 per cent on the interest rate charged by MFIs on loans to SHGs. This was indicated by Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee to Chief Minister K. Rosaiah during a telephonic conversation recently. Disclosing this at a media conference here on Monday, Minister for Rural Development V. Vasanth Kumar and Minister for Agriculture N. Raghuveera Reddy said Mr. Mukherjee informed that the...
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Poor get less food from Sonia's NAC
The National Advisory Council, headed by Congress President Sonia Gandhi, on Saturday settled for a much less ambitious National Food Security Act than it had previously agreed to. Scaling down its recommendations, it decided to recommend subsidised foodgrains for 46% of the rural Indian population and 28% of the urban population. The pruning of the recommendation had an immediate fallout, with the NAC member Jean Dreaze, face of the right-to-food security campaign,...
More »Cut-Rate Democracy by Pranjoy Guha Thakurta
Two years ago, when I told some of my more cynical fellow-tribals from the journalistic fraternity that I was about to complete a textbook on media ethics, they smirked. Media ethics? That’s an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, they said glibly. What became apparent to me then was that the image of the journalist in India has taken quite a battering. There are many among the aam admi who still...
More »NAC's compromise proposes wider food security coverage by Smita Gupta
The National Advisory Council (NAC) — which has been working hard over the last month to try and narrow down its differences with the Planning Commission and the government on the contentious issue of food security — is meeting here on Saturday to look at an amended proposal. The NAC's food hardliners have finally accepted, after several informal interactions with the Commission and government representatives, that universalisation of food security...
More »Millennium Development Goals & India by KS Jacob
The Millennium Development declaration was a visionary document, which sought partnership between rich and poor nations to make globalisation a force for good. Its signatories agreed to explicit goals on a specific timeline. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set ambitious targets for reducing hunger, poverty, infant and maternal mortality, for reversing the spread of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria and giving children basic education by 2015. These also included gender equality,...
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