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...

In each of the last three years – from 2020 through 2022 – Indian banks lent more money to retail customers purchasing homes than they did to farmers. In fiscal year (FY)2021-22 commercial banks gaveRs. 17.54 lakh crore worth of housing loans, while agriculture and allied activities got Rs. 15.16 lakh crore. That is nearly 14 percent less. In FY 2021 and FY 2020 – one of which saw a...

-TheConversation.com/TheWire.in With the cost-of-living crisis now at the top of the public’s agenda in many developed countries, the setting of interest rates has ceased to be just a technical matter and has instead become highly political. Where is the global economy heading in 2023? After all the challenges of last year, it’s a question we ask with trepidation. Just as the economy was dealing with the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic,...

-The Hindu ‘Commercial banks may have to raise deposit rates more to meet a surge in credit demand; while banks have swiftly transmitted increases to lending rates, deposit rates have been laggards for most’ Under the backdrop of a highly uncertain global environment caused by globalisation of inflation, energy and food shortages, and synchronised tightening of monetary policy worldwide, the Indian economy was exhibiting signs of a gradual strengthening of the growth...

-VillageSquare.in With intensifying monsoons and deepening soil erosion, Assam is becoming one of India’s states most vulnerable to climate change, hurting food production and livelihoods in the process. Each year, during the monsoon, the mighty Brahmaputra River and its tributaries burst their banks and engulf huge tracts of farming and residential land in the remote north-eastern state of Assam, home to 34 million people. The state government, engineers and other experts are exploring...