In 1985, Ashish Bose coined the term BIMARU while preparing a report on national population growth rate for Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. At the time, he was a professor at Delhi's Institute of Economic Growth. Ever since, BIMARU has been used to describe the four northern states that are seen as symptomatic of what's wrong with India.Shobhan Saxena asks Bose, 80, if Bihar is proof that BIMARU is history. Bihar...
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Unique facility, or recipe for trouble? by Jean Drèze
It is quite likely that a few weeks from now someone will be knocking at your doors and asking for your fingerprints. If you agree, your fingerprints will enter a national database, along with personal characteristics (age, sex, occupation, and so on) that have already been collected from you, unless you were missed in the “Census household listing” earlier this year. The purpose of this exercise is to build the National...
More »Black swan in micro-finance by Ajit Ranade
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...
More »MFIs similar to moneylenders, says Reddy by Gayatri Nayak
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...
More »On the cards, a Human Development Report for MMR
The MMRDA is in the process of signing an MoU with the Regional Centre for Urban & Environmental Studies (RCUES) to prepare a Human Development Report on the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR). United Nations Development Programme has also agreed to be associated with the report. The scope of work for the RCUES would be introducing geography of MMR, demographics, economic dimensions, health, education, housing and shelter, quality of life and environment....
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