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...

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...

--Press release by National Coalition on the Education Emergency dated 31st October, 2022 More than 12 organisations and several individuals were part of a national consultation where issues faced by migrant children were discussed and actionable recommendations were proposed.  Bengaluru, Mumbai and New Delhi, October 31, 2022: Not-for-profit organisations and civil society institutions have demanded that migrant children be provided the right to quality education immediately and have proposed an actionable framework...

-Press release by International Labour Organisation dated 12 September, 2022 Latest estimates show that forced labour and forced marriage have increased significantly in the last five years, according to the International Labour Organization, Walk Free and the International Organization for Migration. GENEVA (ILO News): Fifty million people were living in modern slavery in 2021, according to the latest Global Estimates of Modern Slavery. Of these people, 28 million were in forced labour...

Is India going to face inflation in cereal prices during the rest of the current financial year? Experts differ on this. An analysis by Nomura Global Economics and CEIC finds that a below normal monsoon does not always translate into high retail inflation in food. Similarly, an above normal southwest monsoon does not always bring down the rate of food inflation. However, some agricultural experts (please click here, here and...