Muhammad Yunus, the economist who founded Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, visited Mumbai recently where he spoke to India Ink about his vision of “social businesses,” his forced departure from Grameen and the recent controversies that have dogged micro-finance in India and elsewhere. An edited, condensed version of the interview follows: Q. The microfinance industry has gone through an existential crisis in the last few years. Why did the industry fall from grace? A. See,...

After Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan declared 2012 as the year of family planning, some district collectors seem to have tossed the rule book to the winds to meet their targets. Such has been the zeal among the officials to bring more and more people under the scalpel that they are luring and misguiding protected tribals with dwindling population into sterilization. From aanganwadi workers to tehsildars and village 'patwaris',...

After Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan declared 2012 as the year of family planning, some district collectors seem to have tossed the rule book to the winds to meet their targets. Such has been the zeal among the officials to bring more and more people under the scalpel that they are luring and misguiding protected tribals with dwindling population into sterilization. From aanganwadi workers to tehsildars and village 'patwaris', everyone...

-IANS Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh on Friday expressed concern that the government's Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) is being seen as a "token sanitation campaign" and rued that women were demanding mobile phones but not toilets.  "Women demand mobile phones, they are not demanding toilets... Sanitation is the much more difficult issue," Ramesh said at the launch of Asia-Pacific Regional MDGs (Millenium Development Goals) Report 2011-12.  Ramesh said women's self-help groups (SHGs) should...

The huge expenditure on the food bill, with the attendant leakages, could well make fiscal recovery impossible In the first part of this article, we have estimated the actual cost of implementing the food security bill in its current form. In this part, we now examine the fiscal sustainability of the same. The current state of the revenue and expenditure trends of the Central government (refer table) show that while revenue...