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...

National Law School of India University, Bengaluru What is the status of hunger and malnutrition in India? The year 2023 marks a decade since the enactment of the National Food Security Act (NFSA). The Act aims to provide food and nutritional security by ensuring access to quality food at affordable prices. However, despite 10 years of food security being a legal right and the availability of sufficient quantities of food grains, India...

The World Food and Agriculture – Statistical Yearbook 2022, released in December 2022, provides its readers a plethora of useful statistics and data across the countries pertaining to agriculture and food security. The yearbook by Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) primarily covers four themes -- Economic Dimensions of Agriculture; Production, Trade and Prices of Commodities; Food Security and Nutrition; and Sustainability and Environmental Aspects of Agriculture.  While going through the report,...

-The Hindu Business Line The National Food Security Act could adopt standardised criteria to identify beneficiaries across States/UTs India’s development report cards have long been plagued by high incidence of malnutrition, making it an often-cited example of the nation’s growth conundrum. With the country being home to more than one-third of undernourished children, it is evident that the problem underlines the need for a targeted and multi-sectoral approach, with the benefits of...

-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...