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...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Climate change will likely exacerbate Indian rural household's debt burden
Editorial team, Carbon Copy Ongoing shifts in rainfall and temperature caused by climate change are likely to increase the debt burden faced by rural households, particularly of marginalised groups in dry areas, an editorial in Carbon Copy magazine said. The piece cited a study in the journal Climate Change that argues that changes in climate, along with existing socio-economic differences - caste and landholding in particular — will deepen the size...
More »Activists Flag ‘Erosion of Confidence’ in MGNREGA for Drop in Job Demand -Ronak Chhabra
-Newsclick.in Kicking off a 3-day nationwide campaign on Wednesday, NREGA Sangharsh Morcha cited “derisively low budget allocation” and “long delays in wage payments” as reasons for turning many rural workers away from the employment guarantee scheme. New Delhi: Days after the Centre cited the drop in demand for work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) to suggest stability in the labour market, rural workers and social activists, as...
More »‘Digging your own grave’: Illegal sand mining devastates Bihar’s rivers -Mohd Imran Khan
-TheThirdPole.net This year, Bihar extended a seasonal ban on mining sand from its rivers. But illegal sand mining continues every day across the eastern Indian state Deep inside the riverine belt of Koelwar in Bhojpur district of Bihar, around four to five kilometres from the main road and well out of sight, a dozen labourers are cutting and digging a portion of the Sone River in bright afternoon sunshine. Bare-chested, wielding spades...
More »Real wage rates of the rural workers hardly increased during the last 6 years
In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...
More »