Human-caused climate change made April's record-breaking heatwaves in Bangladesh, India, Laos, and Thailand at least 30 times more likely, according to an analysis conducted by a group of leading climate scientists. The study by World Weather Attribution also emphasises that the region's high vulnerability, known as a heatwave hotspot, exacerbated the impacts of the heatwave. During April, parts of south and southeast Asia faced an intense heatwave, reaching unprecedented temperatures exceeding 42...

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...

Hindu Businessline El Nino is one piece in the mammoth jigsaw puzzle that the Pacific Ocean and its seasonal climatic patterns typify. Being the largest single body of water, the Pacific has an outsized influence on weather and climate across the globe. During El Niño, trade winds weaken and warm water gets pushed back East of the Pacific, towards the West coast of the Americas.  Generally, El Niño occurs more frequently than...

DeCEDA/Qrius 2022 was a milestone year for India. India walked into 2022 with an infectious wave of Covid-19 impacting lakhs of people, the wave receded a few weeks into the year. As hopes for a post-pandemic recovery surged, war in Ukraine brought in new challenges for the economy. With supply chains disrupted, global sanctions imposed on Russia, prices of fuel and food shot up. Inflation, already on a high from pent-up...

A decade ago, this figure was around 40%. This is leading to an increasingly polarised stock market - Marcellus/The Wire The United Payments Interface and the digitisation of business activity in India are one of the several factors driving an exponential surge in the concentration of corporate profitability in India. Improvements in transport infrastructure (e.g., the highway network has doubled over the past decade), the introduction of GST (in 2017) and new...