The poster boy of microfinance is now seeking some anonymity. In Andhra Pradesh, the epicentre of the worst crisis faced by microfinance in India, SKS Microfinance is playing down its identity and going into preservation mode. At its modest office in a residential colony in Warangal district, India’s largest microfinance company has taken down its board. At its head office in upmarket Begumpet in Hyderabad, it hung a cloth mesh...

Ashok Chavan may have been forced to quit within weeks of his name being linked to the alleged shady dealings involving the Adarsh Housing Society but the CBI has been probing the members of the group for almost six months now, suspecting some of them to be proxy owners.The investigation was launched into the source of income of the defence officers and Central employees who own apartments in their name...

A court in India has given life sentences to 44 Marxist supporters for killing 11 landless farmers supporting a rival party 10 years ago. The farmers were supporters of the state of West Bengal's opposition Trinamul Congress party. The 44 supporters of the Communist Party of India - Marxist (CPI-M) were convicted of murder and rioting. The convicted include CPI-M senior leaders Mohan Sheikh and Gopal Majhi and two senior rural body members. A...

In the first week of September, two things happened in western Uttar Pradesh. The first is that a township that was supposed to be constructed in Aligarh district as part of the Yamuna Expressway project was scrapped. The second was that the UP government announced a revised compensation scheme for the acquisition of land. And now, more than two months later, that bears fruit: the township is back on, and...

Several newspapers and TV channels, some of them among India’s biggest, have claimed credit for exposing the Adarsh society scam in which the who’s who of India’s defense and political establishment are involved. The scam exposes the nexus between bureaucrats, politicians and unscrupulous defense service officers. Obviously it wouldn’t be anyone’s ‘exclusive’ if so many newspapers and channels broke the news. Or else there would be one journalist who reported...