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...

The newly released World Bank report has estimated that the number of extremely poor people globally went up by nearly 71 million in the year 2020 as compared to 2019 — a 11 percent increase. Between 2019 and 2020, the number of poor swelled by around 56 million in India. It means that about 79 percent of the total people globally who slipped into poverty during the first year of...

-Business Standard Says the actual poverty is much higher than suggested by the multilateral lender, adding there is lack of scientific basis in computing the poverty line The government has contested the World Bank's recently released data that showed only 12.4 per cent of India's population was poor in 2011-12, considering an expenditure cut-off of $1.9 a person a day on purchasing power parity (PPP) terms. It said the actual poverty was...

Without equality, democracy and social justice, which are three interrelated factors, secularism cannot exist as a positive value in society. I HAVE known Prof. Romila Thapar for about 45 years, most of it as a colleague at the Centre for Historical Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Romila, as she is called by almost everybody – from her eight-year-old grandnephew to all of us present here – had helped to...

Poverty is a multi-dimensional concept. Official statistics in India have always referred, arguably narrowly, to only income poverty (using the proxy measure of consumption expenditure from the NSSO surveys).The Suresh Tendulkar Committee report submitted to the Planning Commission is the latest input to the “Great Indian Poverty Debate”. While the increase in the number of poor households, as suggested by the Tendulkar Committee, may indeed help expand the coverage of...