Fifty thousand jobs? The U.S. economy has lost that many every week, on average, for a straight 140 weeks since December 2007. Now that the media's gush and drool over the Obama visit has run dry — thanks to other far more interesting events — it might be worth looking at a couple of ‘outcomes' that much of our media seemed pretty taken with.‘Twenty deals worth 10 billion dollars that create...
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Understanding the Puzzling Nature of Poverty by Akash Kapur
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...
More »India Microcredit Faces Collapse From Defaults by Lydia Polgreen and Vikas Bajaj
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...
More »K'taka to enter microfinance
Close on the heels of the recent controversy surrounding over the microfinance institutions, Karnataka government has decided to foray into the micro finance business with an initial corpus of Rs 500 crore. With this, Karnataka will join the league of Andhra Pradesh to have its own state-funded microfinance institution. The government plans to lend at the rate of 4 per cent interest per annum to unorganised sector workers. “There are about 3.5...
More »It's up to Manmohan to decide on MNREGS wage hike: Joshi
Union Rural Development Minister C.P. Joshi on Friday maintained that the Centre was set to increase the wage rate paid under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS), but it was for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to address the issues raised by UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi. Dr. Joshi said it was not for him to react to the recommendation made to Dr. Singh by Ms. Gandhi — in her...
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