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...

-Newsclick.in India needs a larger government expenditure on transfers to the working people. For such larger expenditure, resources have to be raised through greatly increased taxation of the rich- a reversal of the perverse fiscal strategy the government has pursued so far. The Indian economy is currently caught in a vicious spiral of inflation, stagnation and a widening of the fiscal deficit. And this spiral is set to become even more vicious...

-The Hindu Business Line The development economist, now part of Tamil Nadu’s Economic Advisory Council, says that public expenditure on health is just 0.6 per cent of the state domestic product, one of the lowest ratios among Indian states * Universal quality education, health care and social security are still distant goals * A well-designed system of emergency cash transfers would be quite useful in this situation of recurrent crises, which may last...

-IndiaSpend.com To fight hunger and distress due to the pandemic, India must universalise foodgrain distribution, expand the food basket in its rations scheme and provide cash transfers, activist Anjali Bhardwaj tells us in this interview Bengaluru: The pandemic-induced lockdowns have had a profound impact on livelihoods, affecting poor Indians' food intake, studies show. In October 2020, more than half the respondents of a Hunger Survey said their rice/wheat consumption had declined during...

-Scroll.in In spite of the media hype, the BJP was no match for the Trinamool Congress juggernaut. The 2021 Assembly elections in West Bengal were bitterly fought. The Bharatiya Janata Party marshalled all its resources, pumping in huge sums of money, bringing in national leaders, influencing election arrangements and getting large sections of the national media to portray it as the favourite. In the end, it all came to nought. The BJP fell...