The article referenced as Against the Grain on the front page appears on page 10 of the source under the title "Global rice prices poised to gain on supply woes." Here is the full reproduction of the article:
Global rice prices poised to gain on supply woes
WEATHER, GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS. Output projected to drop by 5 million tonnes, while offtake may rise by 3.8 mt By Subramani Ra Mancombu, Chennai
Rice prices in the global market will likely rise due to the balance swinging to a deficit after over a decade and increasing concerns over weather and fertilizer availability due to geopolitical crises, analysts said.
“We expect rice prices to maintain upward momentum over the coming quarters, with the 2026 annual average falling within a $11.7-12.5/cwt (45.36 kg) range, underpinned by rising concerns over weather risks and fertilizer affordability amid the ongoing US-Iran conflict,” said research agency BMI, a unit of Fitch Solutions.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA), in its report last week, said global rice production is estimated to decline by 5 million tonnes (mt) in 2026-27 (September-August) from 537.8 mt in 2025-26. It projected the largest cuts for India (2 mt), Myanmar (1 mt), and the United States (1 mt).
World rice consumption is seen up 3.8 mt to 541.4 mt, driven by increases in South Asia, especially India, and sub-Saharan Africa as rice continues to be an important staple. Global stocks are projected to decline 3.6 mt to 192.7 mt with the largest reductions in India, Cambodia, Indonesia and the US. In contrast, China rice stocks are forecast to increase 3 mt to 108 mt, accounting for 56 per cent of global stocks.
The Agricultural Marketing Information System (AMIS), an arm of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said global rice prices were mostly steady currently, reflecting muted demand amid shipping disruptions. “India’s export rates are stagnant as market faces slow demand,” it said.
IRAQ STOPS THAI BUY
According to the Thailand Rice Exporters Association, the cereal’s prices increased by about $20 a tonne between May 6 and May 13. Vietnam has increased its rates by $60 since April 1, while India and Pakistan have increased them by less than $10 a tonne.
“We have revised up our 2026 annual average price forecast for CBOT-listed second month rice futures from $11.2/cwt to $11.9/cwt. In line with our view that optimism surrounding global supply prospects would ease from end-2025 levels, rice prices trended higher through early 2026, averaging $10.7/cwt in January, $11/cwt in February and $11.4/cwt in March,” said BMI.
Prices weakened briefly in April, slipping to $11.3/cwt as supply fundamentals, particularly expectations of robust global stocks, reasserted themselves. However, prices regained strength through early May, closing at $12.2/cwt on May 8, the research agency said.
AMIS said Iraq had dropped out of the Thai rice market due to the blockage in the Strait of Hormuz. “Thai rice exports are seen recovering in the second half of 2026 if tensions in West Asia ease,” it said. However, shipments from Burma and the US would decline.
HARVEST PROSPECTS
BMI said while bearish sentiment in the rice futures market remains evident, it has softened notably in Q1 2026. “According to the US CFTC Commitment of Traders report, speculative positioning remained net short at 3,712 contracts as of May 5. This is below the consistently heavier net short positions recorded throughout 2025, when positioning frequently exceeded 3,000 contracts,” it said.
Though there was optimism over global rice production in 2025, the scenario has changed in 2026. BMI said harvest prospects are weak in several major producers, including the US, Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan and Brazil.
“We are cautiously optimistic regarding output for the first (monsoon) crop in India, Vietnam and Thailand, which together account for over 50 per cent of global rice exports, supported by stable near-term weather conditions and sufficient fertilizer availability,” it said. However, inventories, particularly in India, will provide buffer for any problem in the upcoming crop cycle. Governments’ policy support to overcome high fertilizer costs would help insulate yields, it said.
Here is the reproduction of the article as requested:
India’s April crude oil imports down on lower Russian purchases by RIL, Nayara
Rishi Ranjan Kala New Delhi
Overall crude oil imports declined on a monthly basis in April as Reliance Industries (RIL) and Nayara Energy limited their Russian purchases after the world’s third-largest consumer bought record volumes from Moscow a month earlier. According to the Finland-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), India was the second-largest buyer of Russian fossil fuels in April, importing a total of €5 billion (around $5.82 billion) of hydrocarbons.
Crude oil constituted 90 per cent of India’s purchases, totalling €4.5 billion ($5.24 billion). Coal ($346 million) and oil products ($243 million) made up the rest. “India’s total crude import volumes recorded a 3.7 per cent reduction in April. This is partially explained by a 19.4 per cent month-on-month (m-o-m) decrease in Russian imports,” CREA said.
There was a substantial change in unloading at refineries, with Vadinar and Jamnagar refineries’ Russian imports decreasing by almost 92 per cent and 38 per cent respectively, while the State-owned Indian Oil Vadinar refinery’s imports increased 87 per cent. The decline in Russian crude imports at the Vadinar refinery was driven by maintenance-related shutdowns beginning on April 9, as the refinery runs exclusively on Russian feedstock.
New Mangalore and Visakhapatnam refineries (MRPL) stopped Russian imports at the end of November 2025, but purchases resumed in March 2026 and continued into April, with Visakhapatnam’s Russian imports increasing 149 per cent m-o-m.
BIG SHIFT
In contrast, India’s imports of Russian crude oil doubled m-o-m in March 2026, even as cumulative crude imports recorded a 4 per cent reduction that month. The biggest shift was in State-owned refineries’ imports from Russia, which saw a massive 148 per cent increase in March 2026, presumably due to Russian barrels being more available in the spot market, which serve as their primary source of imports, CREA explained.
On Russian crude oil price dynamics during April 2026, CREA said the average price of Russia’s Urals crude rose further, up 19 per cent m-o-m to $112.3 per barrel, remaining more than double the updated EU and UK price cap of $44.1 per barrel, which took effect on February 1, 2026.
“In April, the price discount of Urals-grade crude oil relative to the global benchmark Brent plummeted,” CREA said.
Here is the reproduction of the article titled "Rupee at lifetime low of 96.86 against the dollar," which appears in its full version on page 9 of the source under the headline "Rupee slips 16 paise, hits lifetime low of 96.86 against dollar":
Rupee slips 16 paise, hits lifetime low of 96.86 against dollar
Press Trust of India | Mumbai
Declining for the ninth consecutive session, the rupee depreciated 16 paise to close at a fresh lifetime low of 96.86 against the US dollar on Wednesday as elevated global crude prices amid the West Asia crisis stoked inflation worries.
At the interbank foreign exchange market, the rupee opened at 96.89 against the US dollar, then lost further ground to touch a record low of 96.95. It went up to the day's high of 96.65 before settling at a fresh all-time low of 96.86 against the greenback, registering a fall of 16 paise over its previous close. In the previous session, the rupee tumbled 50 paise to settle at 96.70 against the dollar.
MARKET PRESSURES
“The Indian rupee hit fresh lows on a strong dollar and a surge in US treasury yields. US 30-year treasury yields rose to a two-decade high, while the 10-year yields rose to a 16-month high," said Anuj Choudhary, Research Analyst, Commodities Research at Mirae Asset Sharekhan. “This led to inflation worries and sell-off in global markets, making the markets risk-averse".
Choudhary added, “We expect the rupee to trade with a negative bias on risk aversion in the global markets amid inflation worries... USD/INR spot price is expected to trade in a range of ₹96.5 to ₹97.10".
ECONOMIC WARNING SIGNS
The rupee's sharp decline has emerged as one of the biggest economic warning signs for policymakers, investors and businesses. Once considered among Asia’s more stable currencies, the rupee has now become one of the worst-performing emerging market currencies this year, pressured by a toxic mix of expensive oil, capital outflows, widening trade deficits and a surging US dollar.
Meanwhile, the dollar index, which gauges the greenback’s strength against a basket of six currencies, was trading at 99.42, higher by 0.09 per cent. Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, was trading down 2.77 per cent at $109.95 per barrel in futures trade.
GEOPOLITICAL & DOMESTIC CONTEXT
The US Senate advanced legislation on Tuesday that seeks to force President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Iran war, as a growing number of Republicans defied the President's wishes.
On the domestic equity market front, the Sensex rose by 117.54 points to settle at 75,318.39, and the Nifty was up 41 points to 23,659. Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs) offloaded equities worth ₹1,597.35 crore on a net basis on Wednesday, according to exchange data.
Bombay House tightens grip around Jaguar Land Rover
PLAN OF ACTION. TaMo cuts JLR’s board from 13 to 3, eyes £1.7 b savings over 2 years By Amit Vijay Mohile, Mumbai
Jaguar Land Rover’s decision to cut its operating board from 13 members to just three marks the most significant shift in Tata Motors’ stewardship of the British luxury carmaker since its 2008 acquisition from Ford.
For nearly two decades, the unwritten compact was simple: Bombay House provided capital and strategic patience, while JLR’s UK management retained broad autonomy over products, engineering and operations. That arrangement is now giving way to a leaner, India-linked structure in which the JLR Ltd board comprises Chief Executive PB Balaji, Chief Financial Officer Richard Molyneux and Non-Executive Director Al-Noor Ramji.
A 13-member Executive Committee led by Balaji has been tasked with restoring profitability and cash generation. The committee includes Chief Strategy Officer Balaje Rajan, China and procurement head Qing Pan, Chief Growth Officer Lennard Hoornik, Chief Technology Officer Thomas Müller, Chief Programme Delivery Officer Steve Marsh, and Chief Information and Digital Officer Naveen Krishna, among others.
FY26 WAKE-UP CALL
The restructuring follows a difficult FY26 in which JLR swung to a net loss of about £244 million and burned roughly £2.2 billion in cash. The company was hit by a cyberattack, higher US tariffs, weaker demand in China and the transition costs of repositioning Jaguar as an all-electric brand.
“JLR remains the single most important driver of Tata Motors’ valuation, but it has also become the biggest source of earnings volatility,” said Kranthi Bathini, Equity Strategist at WealthMills Securities. “The governance overhaul suggests the Tata Group wants the same level of operational discipline at JLR that helped revive Tata Motors’ India passenger vehicle business,” Bathini added.
Balaji, the first Tata Motors executive to lead JLR, has been tasked with improving JLR’s cost base and financial consistency. The company is targeting £1.7 billion in savings over two years through “Enterprise Missions” focused on reducing delivered costs, cutting warranty expenses and improving digital productivity. The goal is to bring cash break-even volumes back toward 300,000 vehicles annually.
WHY JLR MATTERS
A JLR spokesperson said the Executive Committee, effective from April 2026, has been given “larger operational autonomy” and “stronger, simplified decision sub-groups” to enable faster decision-making.
Bathini noted that if Balaji succeeds in stabilizing JLR’s earnings, Tata Motors could benefit from stronger group cash flows, lower valuation uncertainty and improved investor confidence.
Why credit guarantees don’t help a range of MSMEs
Srinivas Ramanujam & Meera Siva
In March, the government launched CGSMFI-2.0 — a ₹20,000-crore credit guarantee scheme for microfinance institutions. The sector was in genuine distress: bank lending had contracted 8.5 per cent in the first half of FY2026, credit costs had surged to 15.5 per cent, and smaller MFIs were being frozen out. The scheme was necessary but not sufficient.
This pattern, repeated across sectors, reveals a structural problem. When banks are offered a sovereign guarantee, they do not suddenly lend to the most excluded. Credit flows to larger, better-rated institutions which are already closest to being fundable. A guarantee does not change a lender’s read of the borrower but only changes the cost of being wrong. And if the lender cannot read the borrower at all, the guarantee changes nothing.
LOST MSME DECADE
Similar dynamics have been at play in MSME lending at a larger scale. The MSME credit gap stands at ₹20-25 lakh crore and has not materially shifted in a decade, despite successive guarantee schemes starting with CGTMSE, established in 2000.
After a decade of voluntary participation and modest uptake, RBI made collateral-free lending mandatory for MSE loans up to ₹10 lakh in 2010. In the same breath, it urged that compliance be made a branch staff performance criterion — an early signal the mandate was already being ignored. Industry bodies later documented banks nudging borrowers to waive their CGTMSE cover so loans could be processed with collateral instead. In February, the RBI raised that ceiling to ₹20 lakh. Inflation-indexing a broken compass does not show you the true North.
The aggregate evidence is damning. Only 14 per cent of MSMEs access formal credit; nearly 80 per cent remain self-financed or rely on moneylenders. CGTMSE’s data show 93 per cent of its guarantees are for loans below ₹10 lakh — the segment banks were already mandated to serve. The enterprises that genuinely stall — too large for MUDRA, too unfamiliar for commercial banks, sitting between ₹20 lakh and ₹1 crore — remain unserved. And the lender’s reluctance cannot even be explained by default risk: gross NPAs in the MSE segment stood at under 4 per cent as of March 2024, down from over 9 per cent in 2022. Risk perception and risk reality are disconnected.
BUILDING CREDITWORTHINESS
What would change this is designing the system such that making borrowers creditworthy becomes someone’s explicit mandate and their measurable reward. The reason banks gravitate to better-rated borrowers, whether MFIs or MSMEs, is that weaker borrowers are simply unreadable: no financial records, no repayment history, no sector data. Guarantees cannot fix invisibility.
Three things are needed:
- Guarantee coverage that actually reaches the missed borrowers (the smallest MFIs and the missing-middle MSMEs).
- Technical assistance paired with those guarantees to build borrower capacity.
- Generate data that shifts the lender’s calculus from fear to evidence; and funded borrower financial literacy, so they can present themselves effectively.
Together, these build the track record that eventually makes the guarantee unnecessary — provided guarantee institutions, development finance bodies, and enterprise support organisations work in concert rather than in silos.
We have seen this work. An agri-tech enterprise serving smallholder farmers — the kind that commercial lenders routinely decline — received a guarantee-backed loan of ₹25 lakh paired with structured technical support. Within six months it graduated to a loan without a guarantee. Within four years of that first loan, it listed on the BSE SME Exchange. That listing represented over 50,000 smallholder farmers with higher incomes. It followed from the guarantee structure opening the door, technical assistance building the path, and an enterprise that learned to stand on its own.
The MFI guarantee scheme launched in March will provide necessary liquidity support to some institutions in the short term. The MSME amendments in February are steps in the right direction. But if the pattern holds, the credit gap will look much the same two years or even two decades from now.
Ramanujam is CEO, Villgro Innovation Foundation, and Siva is CEO, Inklude Impact Foundation. Both work on enterprise finance and innovation in India.
RBI revises loan recovery norms after feedback
Our Bureau Mumbai
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has proposed strict curbs on the use of mobile phone disabling tools by lenders, alongside a wider overhaul of loan recovery practices aimed at strengthening borrower protection and tightening oversight of recovery agents.
Under the revised draft amendment directions on “Conduct of Regulated Entities in Recovery of Loans and Engagement of Recovery Agents”, released on Wednesday, lenders will not be allowed to disable or restrict functions of a borrower’s mobile phone as a recovery tool, except in cases where the device itself was financed through a loan.
LOAN ACCOUNT
Even in such cases, lenders can deploy the mechanism only after the loan account becomes 90 days overdue and after issuing multiple notices to the borrower, including a 21-day cure period followed by an additional seven-day notice.
The draft norms also bar lenders from disabling essential features, such as internet access, incoming calls, emergency SOS services and public safety notifications.
Banks, small finance banks and other lenders will have to restore device functionalities within one hour once the borrower clears dues, failing which they will have to compensate the borrower at the rate of ₹250 per hour until the issue is rectified.
The central bank further said lenders cannot access, retain or use any data stored on a borrower’s mobile device for loan recovery or any other purpose under any circumstances.
REVISED FRAMEWORK
The revised framework introduces several additional borrower protection measures amid concerns over coercive recovery practices by lenders and outsourced recovery agencies.
Banks will not be allowed to assign recovery cases to agents if a borrower has lodged a grievance relating to loan dues or recovery proceedings until the complaint is resolved. Lenders will also be required to maintain records of calls made by recovery agents, including recordings of conversations with borrowers, for at least six months.
Recovery agents can contact borrowers only between 8 am and 7 pm unless specifically authorised otherwise by the borrower.
The RBI has also proposed tighter governance standards for recovery agencies, including mandatory due diligence, certification and training requirements for recovery agents, and public disclosure of empanelled recovery agencies on lenders’ websites and digital platforms.
The proposed directions will come into effect from October 1, 2026, from the earlier July 1 deadline.
India eyes S. Korea’s military industry to fuel defence aatmanirbharta
DEFENCE COLLABORATION. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh with South Korea’s Minister for Defence Acquisition Programme Administration Lee Yong-chul in Seoul By Dalip Singh, New Delhi
With South Korea emerging as the world’s 10th largest exporter of military products, displaying exceptional transformation in modern military history, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Wednesday urged the President Lee Jae-Myung regime to jointly develop and produce advanced technologies with India.
Singh, who landed in Seoul on Tuesday after finishing his Vietnam leg of the two-nation tour, held bilateral talks with Minister of National Defence Ahn Gyu-back on Wednesday. During the engagement, both leaders reviewed the entire spectrum of defence cooperation and discussed ways to further expand collaboration in areas such as industry, production, maritime security, emerging technologies, military exchanges, logistics and regional security.
Later, he met with Minister of Defence Acquisition Program Administration, Republic of Korea, Lee Yong-chul, and the two agreed to harness symbiotic efforts to create avenues for joint development, joint production and joint exports, according to a Ministry of Defence statement.
STRATEGIC ROADMAP
A roadmap to unlock the potential of the India-Korea Defence Innovation Accelerator Ecosystem (KIND-X) to synergise the innovation ecosystems of the two countries was discussed.
In 2017, the two countries successfully entered into defence industrial cooperation for the manufacturing of K9 Vajra — a 155mm, 52-calibre howitzer developed by South Korea’s Hanwha Aerospace — in India, with L&T partnering for the project.
Singh later chaired the India-Republic of Korea Defence Industry Business Roundtable, which brought together senior government officials and leading defence industry representatives. The interaction provided a platform for exploring new opportunities in defence manufacturing, co-development, co-production and supply chain partnerships.
INDIGENOUS PUSH
Addressing business leaders, the senior Union Minister highlighted India’s growing defence industrial ecosystem and opportunities under the government’s initiatives aimed at promoting indigenous defence manufacturing and global partnerships. He invited Korean defence companies to strengthen engagement with Indian industry for long-term mutually beneficial collaboration.
MoUs were inked in key areas of defence cooperation, including:
- Promoting cooperation in the field of Defence Cyber.
- Training between India’s National Defence College and Korea National Defence University.
- UN Peacekeeping Cooperation, aimed at making the partnership stronger and multidimensional.
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