Microfinance institutions and non-bank lenders are set to resume full-fledged operations in green and orange zones, or areas designated as safe from the Covid-19 virus outbreak, after the government announced lifting of several restrictions.

Para banks have requested that this window be established through MUDRA, Small Industries Development Bank of India, National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development and National Housing Bank. They are also requesting a special purpose vehicle that would be allowed to leverage about 4 times to provide a funding of ₹50,000 crore to small and medium-sized NBFCs.

Gold loans for business purposes are mostly used by small businesses as short-term working capital for stocking. With gold prices hovering around Rs 47,000 per 10 gm, small businesses will need to take loans to resume operations, said industry executives.

​ NBFCs have also demanded for extension of the Reserve Bank of India's moratorium to them, relaxation on provisioning norms and additional funding from Small industrial Development Bank of India (SIDBI) and National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) through refinance mechanism.

The bank which was under RBI's administration since 2014, failed to come up with a satisfactory revival plan, after which the banking regulator cancelled its license. Majority of the bank's depositors now get 100 per cent of their money back. The government hiked the minimum deposit insurance cover from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 5 lakh in its budget announcement in February.

A day after suggesting that Indian economy is "poised to recover" as indicated by high levels of loan sanctions by banks over last two months, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday pointed out that banks are leaving no stone unturned to ensure that the current coronavirus situation does not result in liquidity crisis for businesses.

Even though much of the stubble of wheat is used as animal fodder but farmers resort to open field burning to get rid of the leftover stalk. Around 11400 incidents of open field burning were recorded as per satellite imagery in Punjab and 7500 in Haryana last year post kharif harvest.

Tamil Nadu's farm-to-table initiative has come to fruition rather unexpectedly, owing to the outbreak of Covid-19.

Major importers like Germany & Japan, which have been buyers of first flush teas from Darjeeling for decades, first want to check the quality before placing order. Iran, which had bought, around 54 million kg of teas in 2019 has also started placing good orders with the tea exporters which has resulted in orthodox tea prices moving up by Rs 30 -40 per kg in comparison to last year.

Punjab Agriculture Secretary Kahan Singh Pannu said that 50% subsidy would be provided to women, scheduled castes and 40% to other farmers. The secretary further said that farmers had been asked to submit their applications to avail the benefit of subsidy on machinery required for paddy and maize cultivation till 10 May.

The lockdown has curbed movement of the cereal from neighbouring states to mandis in Haryana and Punjab.

Corona lockdown has put entire mango trade in West Bengal under deep uncertainty. The debacle is bound to cause severe economic crisis in the Mango zone of the state. West Bengal is one of the largest contributors to India's national mango output that constitutes around 40% of global yield.

With around 6 lakh ton annual production in almost 20,000 ha land, Bidhannagar in the foothills of northern West Bengal contributes around 80% to the state output that is near half of India's total 20 lakh Metric Ton (MT) yield. India is the fifth largest contributor to the global production of around 275 lakh MT.

“Framing of rules is in final stages. As per the proposed guidelines, biostimulants will have to be first registered with government and have to prove efficacy before hitting in the market. Proper labelling will have to be done including name of manufacturers, ingredients and expiry date,” said a senior agriculture ministry official.

There was growing pressure from local corporators and the mayor of Navi Mumbai for closure of the market. A meeting of all the stakeholders was held on Friday, which was attended by Anoop Kumar, principal secretary (marketing).

The government is mulling incentives for reviving old pharmaceutical ingredient units.

Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said that Invest India and the Department for Promotion of Investment and Internal Trade are working to create a genuine single window for setting up factories and manufacturing units.

The minister said India gives the most importance to "the fair dealing and the reciprocity" while signing any multilateral agreements. He said it was not there because of which India did not participate in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

Members of the trade bloc urged India to convey its initial response to the package by May 15 as the Indo-Pacific region braces for a post-Covid-19 economic order, ET has learnt.

Highlighting that network capacity and higher bandwidth services have proved to be crucial, not only during the pandemic itself, but also for e-commerce and economic inclusion in general, it said in an information note: “What can WTO members do to improve communications networks and services?”

The Minister for MSME and Road Transport and Highways said a policy on import substitution is being thought of in the wake of the economic situation created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Gadkari said the industry may not be shut for a long time, and several relaxations could be given by the end of May.

Italy, the largest buyer of Indian coffee, started relaxing the restrictions from Monday much to the relief of the Indian coffee industry. However, the exporters fear intense price pressure from Brazil which is expecting a normal crop.

Rice exports to Bangladesh through West Bengal will likely begin soon as the ministry of home affairs (MHA) has taken a tough stand against the state government for not allowing border trade with India's eastern neighbour.

The fund house wrote down its entire holding in Dewan Housing Finance and Avantha holdings from earlier levels of 75%.

The NAV of Franklin India Dynamic Asset Allocation FOFs (fell 16.6%), Franklin India Multi-Asset Solution (fell 22.42%), Franklin India Life Stage FOFs-20 (fell 6.59%), Franklin India Life Stage FOFs-30 (13.51%), Franklin India Life Stage FOFs-40 ( fell 17.81%) and Franklin India Life Stage FOFs-50 Plus (fell 0.52%).

The scheme is available from today, that is, April 27. It will be available until May 11 or up to utilization of the allocated amount, whichever is earlier. The Reserve Bank will review the timeline and amount, depending upon market conditions.

Rs 50,000 crore Special Liquidity Facility by the RBI to ease redemption pressure on Mutual Funds (MF) in the face of Covid-19 crisis would not only restore confidence in the MF industry but also ensure financial stability in the country.

The regulator has also eased compliance norms with regards to grandfathering of the existing unlisted NCDs, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) said in a circular.

The banks claiming the regulatory benefits would be required to submit a weekly statement, the central bank said in its release.

The decrease in redemptions has happened post RBI's announcement of special liquidity measure of INR 50K crores for the mutual fund Industry, said a press release issued by Association of Mutual Funds in India o Amfi.

The fund's global CEO had blamed regulatory changes for its decision to shut 6 schemes.

Most debt mutual fund categories have witnessed outflows in the last month, data shows.

Some people knit, others do puzzles, and yet others find calm by colouring. Me, I love pixeling. My computer career started with a super basic computer. It didn’t even have a way to store what I programmed. So, every day, I would write myself a small program that allows me to paint on the screen […]

Sometimes it is fun to re-visit very basic HTML things and look what we can do with them nowadays. This is what I will do now with a radio button group. I will progressively enhance it to look great and still work with keyboard and screen readers. As part of my Logo-O-Matic upgrade, I added […]

I've created two simple bookmarklets to reveal whether CSS background images are being used in an inaccessible way on a page. Use them yourself, or help me learn how to improve them.

Download the slides and view the demo page for my presentation on Putting Flexbox into Practice for Blend Conference 2013, as well as get links to related articles, tutorials, and tools on Flexible Box Layout.

I'm moving from the US to the Netherlands, and as part of paring down pre-move, I'd like to get rid of several copies of my book Stunning CSS3 before I leave. Find out how to get a copy.

Download the slides and view the demos for my presentation on practical flexbox progressive enhancement, "Leveling Up With Flexbox" for Smashing Conference in Oxford, as well as get links to related articles, tutorials, and tools on Flexible Box Layout.

In memory of Eric Meyer's daughter Becca.

Learn how to use flexbox to pin two things to opposite ends of the viewport with a heading centered in between. Using media queries and flexbox's re-ordering capabilities, we can make this layout pattern even more responsive.

Download the slides and view the demos for my presentation on practical flexbox progressive enhancement for RWD, "Enhancing Responsiveness with Flexbox" for the RWD Summit, as well as get links to related articles, tutorials, and tools on Flexible Box Layout.

I've noticed that there are very few moms speaking at conferences in our industry. I'd like us to do our little part to make it easier for women to work in technology fields by making web design and development conferences more mom-friendly. This can help all of us, not just the moms.

The Modernizr feature-detection script now includes four tests for flexbox support, which you can use to target browsers with varying levels of support more precisely.

Whether you’re an experienced pro or someone new to the industry, finding a great job can be a scary, stressful process. Engineers and designers get inundated with Hacker Rank tests, portfolio requests, and a variety of other queries. Vettery improves the experience for free agents by creating an atmosphere where businesses reach out to you! […]

The post Land Your Dream Job with Vettery (Sponsored) appeared first on David Walsh Blog.

The Firefox DevTools underlying code, which is written with JavaScript and HTML, is a complex application. Due to the complexity and amount of work going on, the DevTools team has done everything they can to load as little as possible. Furthermore the team has a system of lazily importing and initializing objects when they’re needed. […]

The post Lazy Object Initialization appeared first on David Walsh Blog.

We’ve used hex colors for years but 8-digit hexadecimal is still relatively new. While rgba is simple to understand, 8-digit hex is more difficult, as you need to provide a hex representation of a numeric value. The following is a hexadecimal chart of opacity! Opacity Value Hex Code 100 FF 99 FC 98 FA 97 […]

The post Hex Opacity Table appeared first on David Walsh Blog.

One interesting aspect of working at Mozilla is that Firefox lives in a mercurial repository while several other projects live on GitHub in a git repository. While most focus on either Firefox or another project, I switch between both, leaving me running git commands inside the mercurial repository and hg commands inside git repos. It’s […]

The post Detect git Directory with Bash appeared first on David Walsh Blog.

Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks is an amazing engineer and blogger. He’s not only creative but has always had the drive to put his thoughts to work, no matter how large. He also has a good eye for the little things that can make CSS-Tricks or your site special. One of those little things is his […]

The post How to Create a CSS-Tricks Custom Scrollbar appeared first on David Walsh Blog.

Those of you who follow this blog know that not every blog post is an endorsement of a technique but simply a tutorial how to accomplish something. Sometimes the technique described is probably not something you should do. This is one of those blog posts. The Babel parser is an essential tool in the web […]

The post How to Add Native Keyword Aliases to Babel appeared first on David Walsh Blog.

In August, due to a twitter discussion with Molly, and of course while partying on a Saturday night, Dave Gregory and I were looking at whether the Flexible box layout module (still a working draft) is getting close to ready for prime time yet. Our hope was that it will solve some of the frustrations [...]