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 Hindu A successful pilot project involving outreach staff at the State’s only de-addiction facility exclusively for women has been discontinued While Punjab is waging an all-out war against drugs, it faces a Herculean task in curbing substance abuse by women, who have often been overlooked in the discourse. Against this backdrop, a recent video showing a young, inebriated woman by a roadside bench in Kapurthala has caught the glare of public...

Door-to-door and village-to-village surveys carried out by researchers of the Department of Economics and Sociology, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana detected a total of 9,291 suicides that were committed by farmers in six districts of Punjab during the period from 2000 to 2018. Situated in the Malwa region of Punjab, which is known for cotton farming and the prevalence of cancer among its population, Sangrur (2,506) witnessed the highest number of...

-TheWire.in The Union government, cut off from the realities of the vast diversity of health and poverty conditions of the country, appears to have bitten the bait of corporate lobbies. Madhu Soren (12) and Bokai Soren (7) are two brothers with thalassemia in a village in Jharkhand’s East Singhbhum district. Thalassemia is a genetic blood disorder in which the body has lower than normal amounts of haemoglobin, an oxygen-carrying protein. When there is...

-Business Standard CUET has merit but pitfalls too The University Grants Commission has taken a broadly sensible decision to hold a mandatory Common University Entrance Test (CUET) for undergraduate admission to all 45 centrally funded universities from the upcoming academic year. This means Class XII board exam marks will be superseded for determining university admission in favour of an all-India exam on the lines of the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for admission to...