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 Telegraph India’s economic recovery is uneven India’s ranking as one of the world’s fastest growing economies — a bright spot in a troubled and slowing world economy — routinely figures in the public discourse. It was upheld even as oil prices zoomed and inflation surged early this year. It did not waver when growth forecasts were lowered some six months ago. It wasn’t rattled when growth underperformed in the April-June quarter....

Contrary to the rising economic distress on the ground since the last few years, the official press release related to the fourth Annual Report on the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) at first glance seems to give a rosy picture about the employment situation in India.  Defined as the percentage of persons unemployed among the persons in the labour force, the unemployment rate in usual status (principal activity status + subsidiary economic activity status)...

-Newsclick.in The authors propose a project to increase the long-term employment of women that decisively breaks from neoliberalism. Like other countries where the neo-liberal project is ascending, India is witnessing a rise in unemployment and a falling labour force participation of women. Proponents of the neo-liberal project claim that women’s labour force participation falls in periods of rising family incomes. The question, however, remains that even if family incomes were rising (though...

-The Hindu Textile traders and cotton farmers say they’re suffering unprecedented losses. For a State half whose population is linked to textiles, such a crisis could have far-reaching consequences. With the Assembly polls scheduled in Gujarat later this year,  A.M. Jigeesh explores whether this financial adversity could have political repercussions Hours after the Goods and Services Tax (GST) was launched at a midnight gala on June 30, 2017, a 38-year-old textile trader,...