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...

-PTI/ The Telegraph Confederation of Indian Industry, which was part of the virtual pre-Budget meeting, calls for an aggressive focus on privatisation of public sector units The Budget should focus on measures to accelerate job creation and broaden the tax base by rationalising GST and personal income tax slabs to boost consumption, industry bodies said in their pre-Budget meeting with finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday. "The external scenario is likely to continue...

-The Hindu Consumer demand started to decline before the pandemic and worsened after outbreak In September, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman was anguished that industry was holding back from investing in manufacturing despite a significant cut in Corporate tax rates in 2019. The slowdown in corporate investment did not happen because companies were making losses. In fact, private companies, boosted by considerable tax cuts, made windfall profits. A State Bank of India analysis shows...

-The Hindu The one lever that the government could have pulled as it watched private investment decline was to step up public investment In a meeting held with the country’s corporate leaders on September 15, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman drew attention to an important aspect of the economy today. She rightly flagged concerns about sluggish corporate investment, despite the government’s business-friendly stance, including a reduction in the corporate tax. The reduction, effected...

-Newsclick.in Three transformative steps could dramatically change this dire situation – provided Modi Govt. has the will to take them. Wage growth of households has declined from 8.2% in 2012-2016 to 5.7% in 2017-2021, according to a fresh study by a ratings agency. It will actually be even lower – around 1% - if inflation is taken into account. This slowing down of wage growth has happened in both rural and urban...