KEY TRENDS • Oxfam India's 2023 India Supplement report on poverty and inequality in India reveals that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Following the pandemic in 2019, the bottom 50 per cent of the population have continued to see their wealth chipped away. By 2020, their income share was estimated to have fallen to only 13 per cent of the national income and have less than 3...
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Indian banks gave more home loans than agricultural credit
In each of the last three years – from 2020 through 2022 – Indian banks lent more money to retail customers purchasing homes than they did to farmers. In fiscal year (FY)2021-22 commercial banks gaveRs. 17.54 lakh crore worth of housing loans, while agriculture and allied activities got Rs. 15.16 lakh crore. That is nearly 14 percent less. In FY 2021 and FY 2020 – one of which saw a...
More »Crop insurance is not the perfect medication for farmers, says economist -Nagesh Prabhu
-The Hindu A book brought out by NABARD, authored by R.S. Deshpande, says Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana carries the baggage of the earlier failed crop insurance schemes A book on the theme “Rainfed Agriculture and Droughts in India” (2022) brought out by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) argues that crop insurance is not a “perfect medication” any more for farmers hit by natural calamities such as floods...
More »Are we witnessing depeasantisation in Indian agriculture?
The newly released Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households and Land and Livestock Holdings of Households in Rural India (NSS 77th Round) establishes the fact that the farm households are more and more relying on wage incomes instead of 'net incomes from crop cultivation' for their livelihoods. In Marxian lexicon, proletarisation (a term that we can loosely use for depeasantisation) refers to the process in which the farmers/ tillers are...
More »RBI proposal to loosen lending norms for private players a catastrophe in the making -Rana Mitra
-Frontline.thehindu.com The RBI’s proposal to loosen regulations for private lenders in the microfinance space will have disastrous consequences for the poor, especially women in rural areas. Microfinance, a category of financial services aimed at serving people from low-income households who lack access to conventional banking credit and services, was originally designed by international finance capital institutions such as the World Bank as an alternative to providing direct concessional credit to the poor—which...
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