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...
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How Feasible Is MSP as a Legal Right? Farmers Discuss at Kisan Sansad -Indra Shekhar Singh
-TheWire.in Protesting farmers believe that the MSP will as a legal right will solve a lot of farmers' issues, including debt. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi was busy touting the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, the Kisan Sansad (parallel parliament organised by farmers at Jantar Mantar) delved into a serious question – can the minimum support price (MSP) become a legal right? There were 200 new farmers’ representatives and six hours to...
More »Amidst Rain, Kisan Sansad Takes on Contract Farming -Indra Shekhar Singh
-TheWire.in 'They made us buy seeds and fertilisers when the market prices crashed. Then, Pepsi said my produce didn’t meet their grade.' New Delhi: It rained all day as another session of the Kisan Sansad (farmers’ parliament) was in progress. Even a neem tree and a canopy couldn’t keep the Sansad venue from getting drenched. But this was no deterrent for those in attendance. The topic for the day was the Contract Farming...
More »The Poverty of Economic Conservatism -Prabhat Patnaik
-NetworkIdeas.org In terms of economic policy, the Modi government must be perhaps the most conservative in the world. During the entire period of the pandemic when millions of people lost their incomes and livelihood support, most governments around the world provided universal cash transfers to the people, but not the Modi government. True, many other third world countries too did not provide such universal cash transfers, but their hands were tied;...
More »Tax exemptions and incentives for the corporate sector continue despite reduction in corporate tax rates
Quite often it is argued by mainstream economists that a sizeable chunk of the Union Budget every year is wasted because the Government spends that on food and fertiliser subsidies. The burgeoning size of these two subsidies relative to the entire budget as well as the gross domestic product (GDP) is often used to build the argument that economic as well as environmental sustainability of the country is at stake...
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