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...

-IndiaTomorrow.net NEW DELHI: Many people were surprised when Union Home Minister Amit Shah was given the additional charge of the newly created Ministry of Cooperation. The Cooperation Ministry was earlier a part of the Ministry of Agriculture. But it was no amazement for those acquainted with how the cooperative movement plays a role in politics – state as well as national politics – and how BJP used the cooperatives from the state...

-The Indian Express Farmers in poll-bound Bihar are seeking mandis 'like in Punjab and Haryana' Begusarai, Khagaria: In 2006, Nitish Kumar’s government showed the way by repealing Bihar’s Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) Act and allowing crops to be freely traded outside the state’s regulated mandis. But 14 years on – when the Narendra Modi government at the Centre has enacted a law dismantling the monopoly of APMC mandis all over India and...

-Frontline.in Interview with Aruna Roy. ARUNA ROY is a well-known social and political activist. A former Indian Administrative Service officer, she resigned from the IAS in 1975 and has since worked with the most oppressed in society. Aruna Roy’s observation on government service is indicative of her future concerns: “Everyone calls it an elite service; I always felt the discourse should be a bit better than what it was. I was shocked...

-News18.com Acclaimed journalist and Founder-Editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India, P Sainath attributes the existential crisis confronting India’s agrarian society to macro-economic policies set in motion 25 years ago. Talking to Anuradha SenGupta, Sainath makes a case for state intervention in agriculture and says the Modi government, with its shifting positions and policies like demonetisation has only aggravated the assault on agrarian livelihoods. Dismissing the buzz about imminent new initiatives...