Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar on Saturday denied that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had sought his explanations on the rising prices of onions and other agricultural commodities. In a brief chat with the media persons on the sidelines of the two-day “Coop Core – 2010,” heralding the nationwide launch of the core banking solutions (CBS) for the urban Cooperative Banks, which began here on Saturday, Mr. Pawar said he too had...

Close on the heels of the recent controversy surrounding over the microfinance institutions, Karnataka government has decided to foray into the micro finance business with an initial corpus of Rs 500 crore. With this, Karnataka will join the league of Andhra Pradesh to have its own state-funded microfinance institution. The government plans to lend at the rate of 4 per cent interest per annum to unorganised sector workers. “There are about 3.5...

The pattern of land distribution has rendered rural landscape of UP disfavourable for farming. The precursor for this is the fragmentation of cultivable land into a large number of `small landholdings'. The process set under the demographic pressure, has caused marginalisation of a vast majority of farmers and posed a severe challenge to the prospects of rural economy and the growth of agriculture in future. Going by the official figure, UP...

Even before the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) finalizes the guidelines for handing out new bank licences, its draft proposal has evoked unease in the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard), which oversees the country’s 82 regional rural banks (RRBs). Nabard has taken exception to the banking regulator’s proposal to allow industrial houses to take over RRBs and convert them into full-fledged banks, saying such a move could dilute...

According to the National Bank of Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) data on loans given out by nationalised and Cooperative Banks, there are more farmers doing agriculture in Delhi than Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and West Bengal. The farmers in Delhi were allotted loan of Rs 22,077 crore in 2009 alone at mere 5% rate of interest, which is the second highest after agriculture-rich Punjab. Delhi’s loan disbursal amount is bizarre,...