-IPA News Service/Newsclick.in Time is ripe to do away with every central cess on petroleum products and reject the government’s narrative that the poor are hurt less by higher prices than the rich. The country is in the grip of an inflationary spiral resulting in a galloping price rise of all essential goods used by people. This crushing price burden is making life exceedingly difficult for the rural and urban poor. The retail...

-Press release by World Meteorological Organization (WMO) dated 18 May 2022 Geneva, 18 May 2022 (WMO): Four key climate change indicators – greenhouse gas concentrations, Sea level rise, ocean heat and ocean acidification – set new records in 2021. This is yet another clear sign that human activities are causing planetary scale changes on land, in the ocean, and in the atmosphere, with harmful and long-lasting ramifications for sustainable development and...

-Hindustan Times The situation, according to the Punjab food and civil supplies department, has arisen due to delay in the Centre’s approval to grant relaxation in the procurement norms as the crop in the current rabi season has percentage of shriveled grain more than the permissible limit of six Chandigarh: There is a glut-like situation in the mandis and procurement centres of Punjab as at least 38 lakh tonne wheat is waiting...

-Mongabay.com - Perennial waterlogging in agricultural fields of Charkhi Dadri is making them uncultivable. Farmers are adopting alternate occupations or taking land on lease in other villages to continue farming. - While groundwater scarcity is a problem in many parts of North India, some 319 villages in Haryana have the opposite issue of waterlogging because of high groundwater levels. - Government interventions, saline water draining attempts and subsidies for crop diversification, along with...

In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...