NIIRA RADIA — owner of PR company Vaishnavi Communications, among others — is not merely a fixer in the old sense of the word. She is a thermometer reading for a very ill society. In April this year, a clutch of mysterious documents had made their way to several media houses. At face value the documents seemed a synopsis of phone conversations between Niira — a powerful lobbyist for Mukesh...

The SKS IPO and the Andhra Pradesh ordinance have suddenly changed everything. Will it be the death knell or will it usher in a reformed and healthy industry? There are three basic facts about micro-finance in India. First, most of what is described as micro-finance industry is actually micro-loans. There is hardly any provision of micro-savings, micro-investments, micro-insurance or micro-pensions. This is mostly because of regulatory reasons, i.e. accepting money...

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 may well be on its way to becoming a superpower, but for millions of marginalized communities — transgenders, female sex workers, men having sex with men (MSM), intravenous drug users (IDUs) — the struggle to live a life with dignity and respect continues. These communities face an uphill battle for a government recognised identity card cutting access to nearly all welfare schemes. Representatives from 20 NGOs and community based...

Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said Friday he intends to regulate but not strangle the microfinance industry, which is in crisis because of new regulations and political Attacks in its biggest Indian market, the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. In comments at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi, Mr. Mukherjee said a committee of the Reserve Bank of India is looking at all aspects of microfinance, which has come...