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...

-The Hindu It justifies the ‘intelligible differentia’ between Scheduled Castes practising Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism and those practising other religions The affidavit filed by the Union government before the Supreme Court Bench hearing the case for the inclusion of Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims on the list of Scheduled Castes contradicts itself at several junctures, leading to a lack of clarity on its arguments defending the current criteria for determining which communities...

-The Hindu The affidavit goes against the 2011 recommendation of National Commission for Scheduled Castes With the Supreme Court awaiting the Union government’s present position on including Dalit Christians as members of Scheduled Castes (SCs), the Narendra Modi government’s latest standing on this aspect has been to reject any such proposition, according to an affidavit filed by the government in November 2019, which also said Dalits who converted to Buddhism could not...

-The Hindu Bench clarifies it has not formed any opinion on the veracity of the allegations by petitioners The Supreme Court on Thursday directed the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to obtain from eight States information about the registration of FIRs, status of investigation, arrests and chargesheets filed in incidents petitioners allege to be attacks targeting the Christian community and institutions. The eight States in question are Bihar, Haryana, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Karnataka,...

-ThePrint.in India’s salaried class shrank by 2.7 percentage points during pandemic, govt’s Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) shows. But data for religious minorities, women is even bleaker. New Delhi: There’s much to lament in India’s post-Covid job market, where recovery has been painfully slow. However, government data suggests that when it comes to the salaried sector, the participation of religious minorities — Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians, in that order — has been...