The microcredit revolution has been celebrated for helping poor women in developing countries start small businesses. By borrowing money for purchases such as a buffalo or sewing machine, the women were able to help lift their families out of poverty. But critics say the microcredit model has been perverted by commercial greed in India, with reports of abusive collection methods and sky-high interest rates. "What began as a simple, innovative model...

All school children across the country will soon have unique identification numbers (UID) which will help in tracking their movement in educational institutions and academic records. This follows the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Union Human Resource Development Ministry and the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) here on Wednesday. The system will help in tracking students' mobility by creating an electronic registry, right from the primary level through...

The Commonwealth Games corruption probe could lead to raids on the homes and offices of some of the organisers to find missing documents, sources said. Agencies investigating wrongdoing in the Games preparations have complained that key files and documents are untraceable or unavailable at the offices of the government departments that carried out the work. Enforcement Directorate sources said they might raid some of the key people behind the organisation of the...

VISHAL, the son of a farm labourer in the west Indian state of Maharashtra, is almost four. He should weigh around 16kg (35lb). But scooping him up from the floor costs his nursery teacher, a frail woman in a faded sari, little effort. She slips Vishal’s scrawny legs through two holes cut in the corners of a cloth sack, which she hooks to a weighing scale. The needle stops at...

With a gas-guzzler of an economy, India had been spending tens of billions of dollars annually to import petroleum. And so its 2009 policy on biofuels mandated that by 2017, India would have enough biofuel production to cover at least 20 percent of the country’s oil consumption. The government has in fact been encouraging the cultivation of jatropha curcas for the past seven years, believing that would be the fastest way...