Two weeks ago on these pages, Rob Katz blogged about an opinion piece in the New York Times, which discussed India’s brewing controversy over microcredit.  Last week, The Economist followed suit, writing its own opinion of the controversy, which, I must confess, is a lot rosier.  Here are some excerpts:

The dispute centres on one poor rural district, Krishna. Some women were reported to have killed themselves because they could not repay the MFIs. In March a top government official in Krishna temporarily shut 50 branch offices of four MFIs, seized and destroyed their records and told their borrowers not to repay their loans. He accused the microfinance groups of charging exorbitant rates.

Microcredit in India, although generally a good thing, has its faults:

"The fact that you can combine a business — a profitable business — with a useful service and a charitable good is a win, win, win," Mike Newman told the USA Today.  You see, Mr. Newman is Vice President of Recellular, a triple bottom line company that collects used cell phones, refurbishes them, and then exports them to developing nations, “where land lines can be costly or unavailable.”  According to USA Today, “The odds are good that a refurbished cellphone in the pocket of a user in Bolivia, Jamaica, Kenya, Ukraine or Yemen originated with ReCellular.”  That’s because on an average week Recellular gets about 75,000 used phones, mostly from charities, which it then spruces up and sends overseas.  “Refurbished cellphones,” USA Today reports, “are opening doors to wireless communication in much of the developing world, where a new cellphone might be prohibitively expensive…”