Suicides of despairing farmers continue in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, despite the claimed implementation of the Rs 3,000-crore Prime Minister’s package and a Rs 1,000-crore package of the state government.Official data released last week show 45 suicides still take place every month. In the past 10 years, a total of 4,427 suicides took place in five districts. After an official loan-waiver scheme was supposed to have taken effect, 919...

They have done much more than uplift their own lives. Members of the city-based  Self-Employed Women's Association (Sewa), it appears, will now be playing an instrumental role in the empowerment of women farmers in Africa! It seems likely that India and the US will together replicate Sewa's agriculture model in Africa, for the betterment of the women farmers there. A discussion to this effect took place during US president Barack...

A farmer on Monday committed suicide due to bad crops and under the fear of non-payment of debt taken from the moneylender in Maharashtra's Thane District.The farmer was identified as Govind Patil, who had taken loan from a moneylender for growing crops.Meanwhile, farmer's association has requested the government to waive off all debts of the deceased farmer."The farmer who has committed suicide, his all debts should be waived off and...

Agricultural Debt Wavier and Debt Relief Scheme (ADWDRS-2008), which was introduced by the Union Government in 2008 to provide debt relief to farmers, has backfired in Chickballapur district. Under the belief that the Government would come out with a similar debt wavier/relief scheme in the future, a majority of farmers have stopped repaying fresh agricultural loans they have taken during 2008-09 and 2009-10, subsequent to the implementation of ADWDRS-2008. Thereby, many farmers,...

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...