Following the pandemic, the income of the bottom 50 per cent of the population is estimated at 13 percent of national income and 3 percent of total wealth Apoorva Mahendru, Kanishk Gomes, Mayurakshi Dutta, Noopur, Pravas Ranjan Mishra Oxfam International's annual inequality report makes for stark reading. The India supplement, part of the main report, states that the top 1 percent of Indians own nearly 40.6 percent of the total wealth in...

- Scroll.in The right to work has been suspended in the state as a result of a political battle over upcoming elections. People working under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in West Bengal have not been paid their wages for more than a year now with the Union government stopping the payment of funds. Bengal is the only state impacted by this stoppage, Scroll.in reports. MGNREGA is a national...

- Scroll.in India prohibited manual scavenging in 1993. But it took another 20 years to expand its legal definition to include the manual cleaning of drains, sewers and septic tanks. Mumbai, with the richest municipal corporation in India, was among the worst offenders when it came to the implementation of the 2013 law. Records maintained by the Safai Karamchari Andolan, a national organisation working for the rights of sanitation workers, show 19...

The World Food and Agriculture – Statistical Yearbook 2022, released in December 2022, provides its readers a plethora of useful statistics and data across the countries pertaining to agriculture and food security. The yearbook by Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) primarily covers four themes -- Economic Dimensions of Agriculture; Production, Trade and Prices of Commodities; Food Security and Nutrition; and Sustainability and Environmental Aspects of Agriculture.  While going through the report,...

-Down to Earth The central government has mandated digitally capturing the attendance of all workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGnregs). Labourers and activist groups have opposed this and pointed out several loopholes in the move. The National Mobile Monitoring System, which came into effect on January 1, 2023, was launched with claims of bringing transparency and eliminating corruption at the ground level. Pilot tests began in May 2021 at...