Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday stressed the need to make India's banks and currency an important part of the international trade and supply chain. The prime minister also exhorted financial institutions to continuously encourage good financial and corporate governance practices. Inaugurating the iconic week celebrations by the Ministry of Finance and Corporate Affairs as part of the Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav, Modi said India has developed various financial inclusion platforms and there is a need to create awareness about them for their optimum utilisation.
About 150 years ago, in British India, big farmers in the western region of Maharashtra agitated over unfair lending practices and demanded a more fair and inclusive financing structure. People say this is where the seeds of the cooperative movement, now omnipresent in the country, were sown. Today, more than 800,000 cooperative societies thrive in India, with 300 million members, a number close to the population of the United States. Despite a reach this deep--grass roots as they call it--cooperatives do not occupy a lion's share in the Indian economy.
Political parties, agriculture experts and progressive farmers demanded such agri reforms for long, he said and attacked the opposition for misleading cultivators on the issue of MSP (minimum support price) and APMCs.
The PM also said that the country does not face problems in farm production but in post-harvest losses and therefore efforts are being made to strengthen post harvest infrastructure facilities and ensure better income for farmers.
Kharge, who was elected Congress president recently, arrived in Himachal Pradesh Tuesday evening and addressed his first public meeting in Banuti in support of party candidate from the Shimla Rural assembly constituency Vikramaditya Singh.
Away from the distraction of its new high-profile politics, Wayanad's worries seemed very down to earth, discovers Shyam G Menon.
The government's largesse was widely expected after the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party lost power in the recent assembly polls in three Hindi heartland states, where rural distress was cited to be one of the reasons for the defeat of the saffron party.
Seeking to make inroads in Chhattisgarh, Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal on Saturday announced 10 'guarantees' for the upcoming assembly polls in the Congress-ruled state including free electricity, monthly 'samman rashi' for women and Rs 3,000 monthly allowance for the unemployed.
Kejriwal charged that the BJP toppled Manipur, Bihar, Assam, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra governments.
The middle class is a big force to fulfil dreams of a prosperous and developed India and our government has taken many decisions to empower it, the prime minister said.
Other than promising several sops to Muslims in Uttar Pradesh, SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav also declared that he would set up a high-level commission to investigate "financial irregularities" by the Mayawati government. Sharat Pradhan reports.
He had resigned from his post as a deputy leader of the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena, Khotkar told reporters in Jalna.
The new agri-infra fund, the duration of which will be 10 years till 2029, aims to provide medium-to-long term debt financing facility for investment in viable projects for post-harvest management infrastructure and community farming assets through interest subvention and financial support.
"Our arrest is against the law as no written order was shown to us," Yadav said.
Chaudhary also announced that if his party is voted into power in Uttar Pradesh, high court benches will be set up in western Uttar Pradesh, Bundelkhand and Purvanchal areas of the state.
A coordination panel comprising senior leaders of the ruling Maha Vikas Aghadi alliance in Maharashtra will look into various aspects of the National Population Register (NPR), Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray said in Mumbai on Tuesday. Addressing the media in Vidhan Bhavan in south Mumbai, where the budget session of the state legislature is underway, Thackeray said, "Responsible leaders of the three parties will be part of it (coordination committee on NPR)." "I won't let anyone snatch the rights of any citizens of Maharashtra. I am very clear on this," he said, when asked about differences in the ruling alliance over the implementation of NPR in the state.
'Whatever I did, I did for the farmers and whatever I am doing, I am doing for the country'
Faulting previous governments for not taking adequate measures to economically empower women in the country, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday said his government was constantly creating an environment in which women self-help groups can connect villages with prosperity as he released Rs 1,625 crore as capitalisation support fund to over four lakh such groups. In a virtual interaction with the women self-help groups (SHGs) under the "Aatmanirbhar Narishakti se Samvad" (dialogue with self-reliant women) initiative, Modi said in a changing India, opportunities are increasing for women to move forward. The movement of woman SHGs has intensified in the last 6-7 years with over 70 lakh of them working across the country, a figure over three times more than earlier, he said, adding over eight crore women are connected with these groups.
There is a clamour for changing land-use from agriculture to commercial, residential or industrial.
'There is no food to eat and water to drink and people are migrating in hordes.' 'Chief Minister Fadnavis must shift his base to Marathwada in such times.' 'If you do not help during a drought, then when will you help?'
India's poverty has started to decline due to efforts of the BJP-led government, Modi said.
These events would include celebrating the centenary of Mahatma Gandhi's Champaran Satyagraha in Bihar in a big way. It was Gandhi's first mass agitation in India, where he had led a protest of peasants against forcible cultivation of indigo.
Sugarcane dues accruing to farmers rose to almost Rs 21,321 crore as of May 2021. Of that Rs 18,820 crore is for the cane supplied in the current season, which will end in September, while the remaining Rs 2,501 crore is from previous years. Of the pending sugarcane dues of 2020-21, almost 63 per cent accrues to the poll-bound state of Uttar Pradesh. The remaining are from Maharashtra and others.
The Congress needs to reorganise itself at the grassroots, infuse younger blood, and have more boots on the ground. Just offering freebies is not the answer anymore. Leadership matters, asserts Ramesh Menon.
'In this country, if any government acquires one of these images -- anti-farmer, or anti-poor or corrupt -- the government doesn't survive.' 'The Modi government is fast acquiring that anti-farmer image, that is why it is nervous.'
Plagued by desertions, internal rifts, and with the image of being a "family party", it remains to be seen how Gowda's son and former Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy would steer the party in the May 10 assembly polls.
Gandhi said it was his responsibility to tell the truth and it is for the people to listen or not to listen.
Thackeray also claimed that the Maharashtra government is yet to receive a total of around Rs 38,000 crore from the Centre.
Tikait has been at loggerheads with various governments on a range of farmers' issues, including loan waivers, minimum support price, power tariff and land acquisition in states such as UP, Haryana Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh.
Indeed, there were frauds, and the politician-banker-industrialist nexus played a role in the rise of NPAs, but governance issues in Indian banking are far more nuanced and complex, reveals Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
To help the country emerge as a true welfare State, political parties must put the country's interests first before strategising to win elections and short-term goals, argues Ramesh Menon.
A war of words between the banker wife of Maharashtra's former chief minister Devendra Fadnavis and Shiv Sena deputy leader Priyanka Chaturvedi has become the latest talking point in state political circles.
The Union Cabinet on Thursday approved the farmers' debt relief fund with an initial corpus of Rs 10,000 crore. The scheme, widely seen as a populist measure ahead of the general elections in 2009, will be implemented by June 30, 2008. The farmers will be entitled to fresh agricultural loans from banks after June 30. The CCEA also removed the ceiling of Rs 1000 crore (Rs 10 billion) for investment by power utility NTPC Ltd in joint ventures and subsidiaries in India & abroad.
In a show of strength in Jind by protesting farmers, Bharatiya Kisan Union leader Rakesh Tikait on Wednesday warned the government that it could find it difficult to stay on in power if the new agri-marketing laws are not repealed.
'We are not talking pennies. The milk business is as large as the automobile industry (about Rs 4 trillion in sales),' points out T N Ninan.
Rahul said the poor, the labourers and the middle class are being sacrificed in the demonetisation 'yajna' for the benefit of the "super-rich families" of the nation.
Once a Congress-led government is formed at the Centre, the farm laws will be revoked and dumped into the 'dustbin', he said, addressing a gathering in the evening here on the conclusion of his 'Kheti Bachao Yatra' (save the farming march), which began from Punjab's Moga district on Sunday.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday said the Indian economy is witnessing a strong recovery after a long and strict lockdown. Addressing a press conference to announce more stimulus measures to boost growth, she said macro-economic indicators are pointing towards recovery. She noted that COVID-19 active cases have declined from over 10 lakh to 4.89 lakh with case fatality rate (CFR) at 1.47 per cent.
Speaking in the assembly, Fadnavis said a pen drive he had submitted contained a conversation between Waqf Board members Mohammad Arshad Khan and Mudasir Lambe.
The United Progressive Alliance's growth story' and food security scheme dominated a Congress workshop on Monday where its media managers from across the country were given training to disseminate party's message on key issues ahead of next Lok Sabha polls.
