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 Only 819 hostels — 391 for girls and 271 for boys — have been sanctioned since the BJRCY scheme’s revision in 2007, against the target of constructing one each in every Block headquarters of low literacy districts  The Parliamentary Standing Committee (PSC) on Social Justice and Empowerment on Monday flayed the Union government over 46 years of missing data for the Central scheme to construct hostels for Scheduled Caste boys...

-News18.com Multiple government schools in Saharanpur have accepted the practice of children from minority communities cleaning school premises and toilets, while the upper caste students look on. Saharanpur: Semi-urban and rural India have perennial issues that their urban counterparts choose to ignore. Caste discrimination is one such issue that becomes evident when one crosses over to villages bordering Saharanpur district in Uttar Pradesh. Brijesh Devi, one of the rare scheduled caste principals, is...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The prevalence of low body weight, stunting and wasting is "significantly higher" among children from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, according to a government survey that nutrition experts say underscores challenges that demand solutions beyond just the availability of more food. The survey, carried out this year, has documented 39 per cent stunting (impaired growth with possible long-term impacts) among boys below five years from Dalit households...

-The Hindu The sense of impunity that drives discrimination against Dalits is at the heart of recent demands for the dilution, or even repeal, of the Act for prevention of atrocities against SCs and STs It is the sense of impunity nurtured by caste hierarchy that prepares the social ground for the “shockingly cruel and inhumane” crimes against Dalits called atrocities. It is this impunity that the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled...