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...

IndiaSpend There are at least five estimates of the number of poor people in India, which put the number of poor in India between 34 million--equivalent to the population of Kerala--to 373 million--more than four times the population of West Bengal. This puts the number of the poor between 2.5% of the population to 29.5%, based on different estimates between 2014 and 2022. Economists have arrived at these estimates through various means, including projections...

-The Hindu The Housing Ministry had informed Parliament that 66 proposals had been received A Parliamentary panel has asked the government to clarify how many of the 66 proposals received under the Affordable Rental Housing Scheme launched for the urban poor, especially migrant workers, during the COVID-19 pandemic have been approved by their respective local urban bodies. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation had informed Parliament that 66 proposals have been...

-Hindustan Times PM Modi had expressed concerns that the utilisation of the funds earmarked for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) was skewed in favour of more affluent states instead of poorer states getting more money, two senior officials said, asking not to be named. After Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged key discrepancies in the jobs guarantee scheme at a recent review meeting on the rural sector, the central...

-The Hindu Poorer States like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar haven’t been able to use the scheme optimally to alleviate poverty, while economically better-off States like Kerala use it as an asset creation tool, say officials The Central government has constituted a committee to review the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme, especially to assess the programme’s efficacy as a Poverty Alleviation tool. The committee, headed by former...