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...

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...

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...

Karnataka is expected to be one of the first beneficiaries of a major subsidised housing programme ‘Rajiv Awas Yojana' for the benefit of the urban poor to be taken up by the Union Government. Bangalore with 577 slums and with a population of nearly 10 lakh living there will stand to be the biggest beneficiary. To begin with, people residing in a total of 3.05 lakh dingy structures or thatched huts in...

For Sonia Gandhi, the change could not have been more dramatic. Just last year, her contribution in pushing for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was hailed as the single largest reason for the fresh mandate received by a government avowedly dedicated to the aam aadmi. Yet, last week, Gandhi, as chairperson of the National Advisory Council (NAC) was reduced to lodging a complaint with Prime Minister...