KEY TRENDS • Oxfam India's 2023 India Supplement report on poverty and inequality in India reveals that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Following the pandemic in 2019, the bottom 50 per cent of the population have continued to see their wealth chipped away. By 2020, their income share was estimated to have fallen to only 13 per cent of the national income and have less than 3...
More »SEARCH RESULT
34 Million or 373 Million: Do We Know How Many In India Are Poor? - Nushaiba Iqbal
IndiaSpend There are at least five estimates of the number of poor people in India, which put the number of poor in India between 34 million--equivalent to the population of Kerala--to 373 million--more than four times the population of West Bengal. This puts the number of the poor between 2.5% of the population to 29.5%, based on different estimates between 2014 and 2022. Economists have arrived at these estimates through various means, including projections...
More »Real Wages Declined for Rural Indians in 2022, a Year When the Economy Somewhat Recovered
The year 2022 was supposed to mark the recovery of the Indian economy from the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns of the preceding two years. However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February pushed up prices of food, fuel and fertilizer worldwide. In India consumer price inflation, which had declined to under 5 percent in the September-November period of 2021, has steadily increased, staying above 6 percent throughout 2022. What happened to rural incomes in 2022? An...
More »Rural Consumption Stays Sluggish; Weather poses risk to recovery - Gireesh Chandra Prasad
Livemint While India staged a double-digit rebound in household consumption in FY22 which is set to expand at over 7% this fiscal, experts point out that India’s consumption story has a weakness — rural folk tightening their belt in the face of inflation. The silver lining is that the worst may be over, unless El Nino conditions disrupt the arrival of the rains and dampen a consumption revival, experts said. Gross domestic product...
More »Budget 2023-24: NREGA, Food Subsidy, Mid day meal allocations cut drastically
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), National Food Security Act (NFSA) are schemes whose allocations have been cut drastically in Budget 2023-24, while the Mid-Day Meals budget has also seen a sharp drop. An analysis by the Accountability Initiative (AI) at the Centre for Policy Research reveals that in the case of NREGA and NFSA, the reduction has been over 30 percent! The budget for Mid-Day meals...
More »