Sayantan Bera

While declining real product prices faced by primary commodity producers was one of the central causes of rising farm indebtedness, the gradual shrinkage of formal credit institutions in rural areas has simultaneously caused increasing dominance of private players in the credit market, rendering producers all the more vulnerable.

The SGSY is being recast. The new name given is National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM). Mission model is the newer approach as it the trend or practice with several of our flagship programmes. The aim, as the NRLM draft claims, is to overcome the limitations of SGSY by restructuring it to speed up the process of poverty reduction.

Around the world, provision of microfinance is becoming a mainstay development intervention for poverty alleviation and empowerment of the poor. Microfinance involves the provision of thrift, credit and other financial services and products of very small amount for enabling the poor to raise their income levels and improving living standards.

In sustaining rural livelihood, sustainability of credit provisioning operation is highly essential. It assumes more significance in the case of developing nations with low per capita income and high level of poverty. It is also important to note that in many of the developing nations the financial viability of rural lending institutions is not satisfactory.

The Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) is in the news again for the wrong reasons, as usual. This time the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Limited (SSNNL) is trying to go back on its promises to the very investors who put their money in the project when it was facing its strongest opposition from all quarters.