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...

-Newsclick.in In the past five years, agri workers’ wage has increased by only about Rs.15 per year. For those leaders of the country who are tearing their hair trying to figure out how to get the economy moving, boost growth, increase investment and create jobs, it would be instructive to look at the plight of the largest economic class in the country – agricultural labourers. Numbering upward of 14 crore, they are...

-Press release by Oxfam India dated 15 September 2022 New Delhi: Oxfam India’s latest ‘India Discrimination Report 2022’ finds women in India despite their same educational qualification and work experience as men will be discriminated in the labour market due to societal and employers’ prejudices. The academically recognised statistical model applied in the India Discrimination Report is now able to quantify the discrimination women face in the labour market. The lower...

-Down to Earth Some 5,563 agricultural labourers died by suicide in 2021, according to the latest report of the National Crime Records Bureau Agriculture was said to be the sole bright spot for India’s gross domestic product growth, clocking a positive growth rate when other sectors fell to the pandemic during the last two years. But the growth did not translate much for agricultural labourers as at least one agricultural labourer died...

Door-to-door and village-to-village surveys carried out by researchers of the Department of Economics and Sociology, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana detected a total of 9,291 suicides that were committed by farmers in six districts of Punjab during the period from 2000 to 2018. Situated in the Malwa region of Punjab, which is known for cotton farming and the prevalence of cancer among its population, Sangrur (2,506) witnessed the highest number of...