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...

Medianama The Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency (TNeGA) floated a second tender in December 2022 for implementation and maintenance of a Master Data Management and de- duplication tool for a State Family Database (SFDB) project. The objective is to assign the ‘Makkal ID’— a unique identification number already allotted to the state’s seven crore residents— to different records across departments. The SFDB is projected to be the “single source of truth” of all...

-PTI/ The Hindu Between 2016–2021, extreme events triggered by climate change caused damage to crops in over 36 million hectares, and a $3.75 billion loss for farmers in the country India suffered an income loss of $159 billion, 5.4% of its gross domestic product, in the service, manufacturing, agriculture, and construction sectors due to extreme heat in 2021, according to a new report.   Heat exposure in the country led to the loss...

-The Telegraph West Bengal Power Development Corporation Limited to file separate affidavits stating particulars of the proposed coal mine project in Birbhum district Calcutta: Calcutta High Court on Tuesday asked both the state government and the West Bengal Power Development Corporation Limited (WBPDCL) to file separate affidavits in two weeks stating details of the proposed Deocha-Pachami-Dewanganj-Harinsingha (DPDH) coal mine project in Birbhum district. A division bench of Chief Justice Prakash Srivastava and Justice...

-NITI Aayog Working Paper, ISBN: 978-81-953811-7-3 Abstract -  The importance of agriculture in an economy usually declines as it climbs the development ladder. Raising agriculture productivity has been known to be an important precursor. Labour productivity in agriculture can either be increased by higher land productivity or higher land availability per farmer and mechanisation. In India, however, the dramatic increase in land productivity through industrial farming has caused severe environmental damage and...