In the beginning, only the National Population Register – and, a little later, Nandan Nilekani’s Unique Identification Authority of India – were supposed to capture and store biometrics. However, over the past few months, India has come to a point where myriad central ministeries, state departments and others are camping in the country’s villages and […]
Monthly Archives: May 2012
another small online story for ET on UIDAI’s new enrolment system. this has been in the works for over four months. what do the glitches they have fixed tell you about how enrolments have been done till now?
A last-minute change in the bill to govern microfinance institutions has sent banks and MFIs into a tizzy. The bill has raised the loan credit limit tenfold, a move that could alter the character of these lenders from tiny loan providers to the poor to financers of the relatively affluent. yep. after all the reports […]
it is official. the bidding process to find a common banking correspondent company for all of maharashtra is over. vakrangee has won with a bid so low banking correspondent companies can scarcely believe it. see this, this and this for context. now to see how well this new approach works.
i am finally reading dov ospovat’s the development of darwin’s theory. back in 2009 when i was studying the drafting of the forest rights act, i had read the origin of species. interspersed in that book were little paragraphs where darwin described numerous experiments he had conducted in the years after he got off the […]
i wrote out another small update for the et website today on how the finance ministry plan to choose one common BC for all public sector banks in maharashtra is coming along.
out today, a small online followup to a story i filed last week — about the finance ministry deciding that India should be split into 20 clusters, and that all public sector banks in each cluster should appoint a common BC for servicing their rural/poor customers.
Some days ago, agriculture minister Sharad Pawar took most people by surprise when he said the UPA government was planning to redirect India’s fertiliser subsidy towards organic and balanced fertilisers. Time will tell if he was serious. In the meantime, here is a small story I wrote for ET’s website on why this announcement was […]
i spent a large chunk of sunday reading the first two volumes of jason lutes’ graphic novel called berlin. set in the late nineteen twenties, the books recreate a time in the city when fundamental forces had been unleashed in germany. rearmament was secretly underway. fascism and socialism were competing for the soul of the […]
Today’s Economic Times carries this story about an unexpectedly large change that is sweeping across the Bank-BC model. The Department of Financial Services, the part of the Finance Ministry which looks after the banking sector, has decided to split the country into 20 clusters and get all public sector banks in that region to work […]
filed this online story yesterday about a landmark judgement by the central information commission on why the MoEF must release even draft reports to the public under the RTI. extremely well-argued judgement, this one.
Anyone watching the telecast of the 2012-13 budget would have concluded that the Finance Ministry was solidly backing Nandan Nilekani’s Unique Identification Authority of India. The budget speech mentioned Nilekani by name. It mentioned the UID programme ten-odd times. And spoke about how Aadhaar would be used to overhaul existing subsidy regimes in India — […]
and now for a question that is puzzling policymakers. over the last 10 years, rbi numbers estimate agri credit has gone up 755%. go with the budget numbers and agri credit has spiked from rs 51,000-odd crore to rs 575,000 crore now. and yet, look at changes in agricultural output, production, expenditure on agri inputs, […]
