The Niti Aayog recently released its National Multidimensional Poverty Index 2023, according to which the poverty headcount ratio declined from 24.85 percent in 2015-16 to 14.96 percent in 2019-21. In absolute numbers this translates to 135 million people exiting multidimensional poverty in this time period. In addition, a few days earlier, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released its own Multidimensional Poverty Index, which in a press note said that,...

The Wire The issue of the deaths of 70 children in the Gambia after consuming cough syrup is back in the news again. These deaths were linked to four medicines made by an Indian manufacturer, Maiden Pharmaceuticals. A Gambian presidential task force has now recommended that the government must sue the drug manufacturer, Maiden Pharmaceuticals, and the drug importer, Atlantic Pharmaceuticals.  It also wants the Government of India to be sued. This...

Peoples' Archive of Rural India Gaddamidi Rajeshwari became a landowner in 2018. “I was excited! I would be a woman who owns land.” Or at least she thought so, looking proudly at the official title deed in her hand. Five years later she is still waiting for the state to recognise her ownership of 1.28 acres of land in Barwad, 30 kilometres from her home in Yenkepalle village for which she...

Scroll.in Though the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (RTE Act) has refocussed attention on school education in recent years, some fundamental problems continue to plague the system. Despite the constitutional and legal obligations of governments, education budgets have remained modest and woefully inadequate to requirements. While there has been a reasonable expansion of coverage and enrolment in schools, the fundamental issue of poor learning outcomes, especially...

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...