Economic Times Call it the next-gen consumption survey. The ongoing government consumption survey is going beyond asking what you eat, what you wear, and what you own; it also wants to know your OTT subscription spend, the time you spend online, how often you shop online, whether you order meals from Zomato or Swiggy, and if you own an electric vehicle. India's Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) will now include questions on...

The high dropout rates in schools in several states, including Karnataka, during 2020-21, as revealed by data from the Ministry of Education, is a matter of concern when the education sector is considered to be recovering from the damage caused by the damage caused by the Covid pandemic. Karnataka, with a dropout rate of 14.6%, is in the company of states like Bihar and Gujarat, which had dropout rates higher...

Australian Broadcasting Corporation Poonam Gond is learning to describe her pain by numbers. Zero means no pain and 10 is agony. Poonam was at seven late last month. "I have never known zero pain," she said, sitting in the plastic chair where she spends most of her days. The 19-year-old has sickle cell disease, a genetic blood disorder. Her medicine ran out weeks ago. Poonam's social worker, Geeta Aayam, nods as 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...