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...

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...

-The Telegraph A system without any steering control An essential characteristic of modern capitalism is that the living conditions of millions of people are determined by the whims and caprices of a handful of financial speculators; indeed, that is what ‘leaving things to the market’ really entails. Consider what is happening in India today. There is a massive outflow of finance from the country because of which the rupee is depreciating  vis-à-vis...

-The Hindu The RBI has estimated a 7.1% inflation rate for the July to September quarter India’s retail inflation touched 7% in August, up from 6.71% in July, fuelled by a 7.62% pick-up in food prices paid by consumers, even as industrial production growth in July had dropped to the lowest level since April at just 2.4%, with output levels dropping 2.75% month-on-month.   This is the eighth successive month that retail inflation...

-DNA India Between 2013 and 2017, over 4 lakh incidents of illegal mining were reported. The mineral wealth of the country is openly looted by mining mafia. What would you do if some people stole some items from your house? You would immediately go to the police against this and ask the police to find your stolen goods? Any person would do the same. But now imagine if some people steal the mineral...