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 Wire Science * Several houses along the eastern Indian coast have been impacted by constant sea erosion, cyclones and other environmental factors. Those living there have abandoned these houses. * Some living in these vulnerable areas, close to the Bay of Bengal, voluntarily moved as the tidal waves hit their homes, while others were resettled by the government. * Inter-state migration from such coastal hotspots has also been reported from Odisha, Andhra...

-TheWire.in A ground report from two Fishing Villages, one in East Medinipur and the other in the Sundarban, reflects how various expressions of climate change leave a mark on health and wellbeing, especially of women. Jharkhali/ Nijkasba, West Bengal: It is easy to consider the south of West Bengal as an unwieldy side of the world that is acutely stricken by the climate crisis. Buzzwords like ‘salinity’, ‘storm surge’, ‘water-level rise’ and ‘ocean...

-Hindustan Times Workers who have registered so far belong to diverse occupations, such as construction, apparel manufacturing, fishing, gig and platform work, street vending as well as domestic work. Nearly half of 40 million workers of the country’s informal economy registered on a recently launched national portal are women, and most workers regardless of gender are from disadvantaged castes, official data that shines new light on India’s invisible unorganised labour force shows. Trends...

-Down to Earth The ‘real owner’ of forest land is still the forest department. Such brazen violation of the law betrays a systematic attempt to implement FRA, reducing it to a symbol rather than a tool of empowerment The Dangs, the smallest district in Gujarat, is a thickly forested and tribal-dominated region that has been away from the ‘developmental’ paradigm till today. Some 77.5 per cent of its area is under forest cover,...