Faced with a liquidity crunch, microfinance companies have asked RBI to direct banks to set up an emergency fund of Rs 1,000 crore to help them tide over slowdown in their business. Sources said the Microfinance Institution Network (MFIN) is trying to convince the central bank in this regard. The micro finance sector has been reeling under a liquidity crisis after the Andhra Pradesh government issued an ordinance to control interest...

'Journalists are only expected to be witnesses.'' While the 2G spectrum scandal has unfolded, it has exposed the involvement of a number of individuals, offices and Institutions in different ways in it. Irregularities of such massive proportions could not been planned and resorted to by a minister and some bureaucrats. The prime minister was told by the supreme court to explain his delay in acting on a request for action against the...

NREGA workers lifted their 47 days long Satyagrah/Dharna after the Center and Rajasthan State governments agreed to their demand wages on basis of Minimum Wages Act 1948. As per the press releas of SR Abhiyan, the struggling organization, on November 11, Mrs Gandhi wrote to the Prime Minister communicating the consensus reached in the NAC meeting on October 23, that workers should be paid minimum wages as notified under the...

MICROFINANCE is an example of something that is sadly all too rare: an anti-poverty tool that usually at least breaks even. If you make small, uncollateralised business loans to groups of poor women, they almost always repay them on time. It has grown rapidly in many countries, not least Bangladesh and India. With nearly 30m clients each, these are now the world’s biggest markets for microfinance. Yet the industry has...

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...