-Livemint.com Together with large stocks of sugar and higher planting of sugar cane, the surplus situation in Indian agriculture is set to worsen, fuelling another round of farmer protests as states like Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Rajasthan goes to polls Pune/ New Delhi: Karan Ramdas Atole’s dairy farm is a neat brown square of cleared ground surrounded by lush green sugarcane fields. A mechanical engineer by training, 25-year-old Atole took a loan...

-The Indian Express The Finance Ministry directed smaller PSBs to cut their corporate loan exposure to 25 per cent of their risk-weighted assets over the medium term and focus more on retail lending. Corporate loans corner the lion’s share of rising bad loans in public sector banks while retail loans have a far superior track record when it comes to timely repayment, according to the latest available Reserve Bank of India...

-TheWeek.in Wilful defaults, loans which are deliberately not repaid by companies despite having the capacity to do so, have surged 152 per cent in the last four years of Modi government. A new report prepared by Pinkerton – a risk management consultancy along with PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry – says that both gross NPAs and wilful defaults have been going up post 2008 financial crisis. The value of wilful defaults...

-The Hindu Business Line Eleven years since its inception, the State’s farmer’s debt relief commission has quietly eased the burden of debt on poor farmers, and grown to be a model worth emulating Earlier this week 35,000 debt-ridden farmers coursed through Maharashtra, walking 180 km on blistered soles, to converge at Mumbai’s Azad Maidan demanding freedom from debt and fair compensation for their produce. As the government scrounged for solutions, it could’ve...

-Livemint.com The number of farmers covered under prime minister’s crop insurance scheme fell to 47.9 million in 2017-18, from a high of 57.5 million the year before, a sharp decline of 17% in just a year New Delhi: Despite the centre pumping more funds into its flagship crop insurance scheme, coverage among farmers is on the decline, according to figures released on Tuesday, indicating a decline in interest among farmers. The number of...