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 Telegraph Jean Dreze claims that in the case of PDS, condition of Chhattisgarh and Odisha is better than Jharkhand Jamshedpur: Economist Jean Dreze said on Friday that not even 70 per cent of public distribution system (PDS) beneficiaries in Jharkhand have been receiving foodgrains after the Covid-19 pandemic. The Belgian economist, social scientist and activist painted a dismal picture of the public distribution system in the state while addressing a workshop on...

-The Telegraph Radhakamal Mukerjee: an ecological pioneer In 1922, a professor at Lucknow University named Radhakamal Mukerjee published a book called Principles of Comparative Economics. Reading the book one hundred years later, I was struck by the attention it paid to the impact of the natural environment on the social and economic life of Indian villages. Mukerjee was perhaps the first Indian scholar to recognise the vital importance of common property resources...

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...

-Newsclick.in Farmlands in Narela’s Garhi Bakhtawarpur village remain flooded for eight months a year due to an overflowing drain. Saving his crops from the overflowing local pond spread across five acres in Garhi Bakhtawarpur village, in Narela, seems to be an eternal battle for Ritesh Rana. Pointing to an inundated patch of farms, Rana said that his family owns 30 acres. However, owning such prime land in the national capital is not beneficial...