reported for this story by my colleague atmadip on how the credit taps might be opening up again for the mfis. which is good for them. coz the last few months have seen mfi loan portfolios shrink as bank lending dried up. At Chennai-headquartered Equitas, the asset base is down from 950 crore to about […]
Monthly Archives: July 2011
Your question was on how to revive PACs. We have to make them thrift-oriented where every member must save x rupees every month instead of waiting for banks to refinance or for Nabard to step in. That may continue but that cannot be a long-term plan. The long-term plan has to be your own funding. When […]
economist and iit delhi professor reetika khera is out with a new, edited volume on the first six years of nrega. and given that i am interested in figuring the myriad ways in which india — politicians, state governments, the centre, rich and poor farmers, babus, what have you — is responding to nrega, i […]
after the stories on dryland agriculture and the crisis in indian agricultural soils, there is this… It’s incontrovertible that Indian agriculture needs an overhaul. Yields are plateauing. Agricultural soils are weakening. Groundwater levels are collapsing. Farmers are leading lives of increasing desperation. The big question is: how do we fix agriculture? Does the answer lie […]
In his fields, Badhia Naval Singh , a farmer tilling 8 bighas of land in the Bagli tehsil in Madhya Pradesh, has been seeing something strange for a while now. Earlier, if he pulled out a tuft of grass, he would see earthworms . “Ab woh dikhna bandh ho gaye hain (they don’t show up […]
With the Finance Ministry completing its draft Microfinance Institutions (Development and Regulation) Bill, another large piece of the puzzle on how to regulate Microfinance Institutions has fallen into place. It has been a tough puzzle to crack. In the beginning of last year, when complaints about women being pushed into debt traps were gathering pace, […]
the draft microfinance bill is up on the finmin website for comments. a look at what it says.
M Rajshekhar 