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...

-Mercom India The Union Cabinet has approved the National Green Hydrogen Mission with an initial outlay of Rs.19,744 crore ($2.38 billion). The policy decision is meant to facilitate demand, production, utilization and export of green hydrogen. The largest portion of the outlay, Rs.17,490 crore, has been earmarked for strategic interventions in the transition to green hydrogen. Also called SIGHT, this sub-component envisages financial incentives for the domestic manufacture of electrolyzers and...

-Scroll.in In theory, natural gas is 'cleaner' than coal, but while producing the gas a certain amount of methane ( a greenhouse gas) leaks into the atmosphere. RK Singh, the Union Minister for Power, New and Renewable Energy, said on December 5 that natural gas is just as responsible as coal for global warming, if not more. “In COP26 they added a line, they wanted to add… phase-out of coal. But thereafter India...

-Press released by Christian Aid dated 27 December, 2022 * Study identifies the year’s 10 costliest extreme events influenced by the climate crisis - each caused more than $3 billion in damage. * Report also examines 10 other extreme events that caused massive human and environmental damage, mostly in the poorest countries. * The floods that submerged parts of Pakistan in June displaced 7m people and caused more than $30 billion in estimated...

There is some respite expected for India in terms of prices of imported commodities. This may ease the depletion of its foreign exchange reserves. The country has faced a widening of its merchandise trade deficit from US$ -17.91 billion to US$ -26.91 billion between October 2021 and October 2022. The commodity price data provided by the World Bank in December 2022 (termed as The Pink Sheet) shows that energy prices plummeted by...