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...

P.V. Satheesh, founder and Executive Director of the Deccan Development Society passed away on 19 March, 2023. Periyapatna Venkatasubbaiah Satheesh – P.V. Satheesh to friends – was born in Mysore in 1945. He studied mass communication and television production at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication and the Film and Television Institute of India. He joined Doordarshan as a senior producer and worked on programming related to rural development and...

-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...

-The Telegraph ‘Hundreds of workers have left for other states and more are following them these days' Siliguri: The trend of out-migration from Bengal — often linked to the lack of employment opportunities in the state — is back in different districts after the Covid-19-induced gap of two years. Senior government officials and elected representatives at rural bodies in a number of districts admitted that they were witnessing the exodus of workers, who...

-Frontline.thehindu.com Though not the only solution to rural unemployment, it is an important social security measure. Soon after becoming Prime Minister, Narendra Modi mocked the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in Parliament and called it a monumental failure of the United Progressive Alliance government. Interestingly, he added that he would not end the scheme but would keep it alive as a symbol of the Congress’ inability to address poverty. Five...