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...

National Law School of India University, Bengaluru What is the status of hunger and malnutrition in India? The year 2023 marks a decade since the enactment of the National Food Security Act (NFSA). The Act aims to provide food and nutritional security by ensuring access to quality food at affordable prices. However, despite 10 years of food security being a legal right and the availability of sufficient quantities of food grains, India...

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...

IndiaSpend On a sweltering April afternoon, Hari Oraon, 51, was sitting outside his home in Latehar’s Ahirpur village of Mahuadanr block, nearly 200 km northwest of Ranchi. He was worried. Owing to pending wages--he had not been paid for seven days--Hari Oraon had not gone to work for the last two days. “I do not know why this happened, and I am not sure if I will receive it,” said Hari, a...