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...

-TheQuint.in After interest payments, food subsidies, fertiliser subsidy will be third largest single-budget govt expenditure. With the Government seeking an additional appropriation of Rs 1.09 crore through the first supplementary in the current session, India’s fertiliser subsidy bill is set to exceed Rs 2.37 lakh crore this fiscal 2022-23. Govt Expenditures Going Big on Fertiliser Subsidies Excluding interest, pensions, and mandatory transfers to state governments, the revised budgetary discretionary expenditure is likely to be...

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...

-TheWire.in India is being targeted using a deeply flawed methodology that the WTO has prescribed for estimating subsidies arising from market price support. On July 1, a dozen US Congressmen wrote a letter to President Joe Biden, asking him to hold India to account for its decades-long violation of commitments made to the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Their contention was that India had been providing minimum support prices to its farmers in violation...

-Hindustan Times India has consistently maintained that this position is based on both an erroneous reading of the nature and intent of India’s price support mechanisms and underplays the scale of America’s support to farmers. Washington: As elections for the House of Representatives loom, a group of Republican Congressional representatives from America’s agricultural belt or with agricultural interests have stepped up the rhetoric against India’s agricultural subsidies — alleging that these distort...