More than 1.79 crore households across the country have been provided employment under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) this year, the Government said today. As of June 30, a total of 179,43,189 families in the country have been provided employment under MGNREGS , Minister of State for Rural Development Pradeep Jain said in a written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha. According to the sate-wise data presented...

The recent crisis in the micro-finance industry, brought about by some incidents in Andhra Pradesh, has led to the development of a new concept in the Indian thinking on development — that of “responsible finance”. Responsible finance is supposed to mean financial activities by companies that make just about enough returns to stay in business and charge rates of interest on loans to the poor that are only marginally higher than what...

Rahul Gandhi, the general secretary of India’s Congress party, often says that there exist “two Indias” — one of the rich, and one of the poor. Those two Indias were in evidence a couple of weeks ago, when closely timed events on opposite sides of the planet brought into relief the deep divides that in many ways define this country. In Mumbai on Nov. 7, President Barack Obama told a group of...

India’s rapidly growing private microcredit industry faces imminent collapse as almost all borrowers in one of India’s largest states have stopped repaying their loans, egged on by politicians who accuse the industry of earning outsize profits on the backs of the poor. The crisis has been building for weeks, but has now reached a critical stage. Indian banks, which put up about 80 percent of the money that the companies...

The rural development ministry has expressed its reservations on linking wages paid under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) with minimum wages mandated by states for farm labour. In an internal note, which was reviewed by Mint, the ministry said such a step could lead to the states upwardly revising minimum wages for farm labour, an increased burden that the Central government then would have to bear. The ministry,...