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 None of its stated objectives have been met and the entire exercise has turned out to be a mere act of converting old notes into new ones, at great inconvenience to the people. In the entire history of post-Independence India, no single economic measure has been as devastating for the people and as utterly futile in achieving its stated objectives, as the demonetisation of currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs...

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)...

-Livemint.com Mahalanobis gave our data system global recognition and we must ask why we lost that credibility In the summer of 1946, at the ‘nuclear’ session of the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC), a representative of a British colony made an impassioned plea for laying down globally accepted standards for conducting large-scale sample surveys. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis argued that household surveys would become invaluable data sources for many developing countries that were...

-Foundation for Agrarian Studies The project report titled “Public Spending on Agriculture in India: 2010-11 to 2019-20,” has been released in April, 2022. The report has been prepared by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies with the support of Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung, New Delhi. In 2021, the Foundation for Agrarian Studies conducted a research project to analyse the trends in public spending on agriculture in India for the most recent decade (2010-11 to...