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 The share of women who are earning through work continues to remain shockingly low in India according to the latest data from the annual Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2021-22 released last month. The report, compiled by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) under the ministry of statistics, also provides a glimpse of the unconscionable gap between the earnings of men and women. In rural areas, about 57% of men are...

-Newsclick.in In the past five years, agri workers’ wage has increased by only about Rs.15 per year. For those leaders of the country who are tearing their hair trying to figure out how to get the economy moving, boost growth, increase investment and create jobs, it would be instructive to look at the plight of the largest economic class in the country – agricultural labourers. Numbering upward of 14 crore, they are...

-Newsclick.in Inequality is not natural but manufactured. It’s time policymakers stopped normalising the wealth and income gap. Else, post-Covid inequality could become a permanent feature. Wealth and income inequality are more than just economic concepts. They also influence education and health outcomes, poverty levels, employment and unemployment rates, opportunities, choices, and, ultimately, happiness. Of late, several reports have investigated the impact of COVID-19 on various segments of society at the regional, national,...

-The Telegraph ‘Hundreds of workers have left for other states and more are following them these days' Siliguri: The trend of out-migration from Bengal — often linked to the lack of employment opportunities in the state — is back in different districts after the Covid-19-induced gap of two years. Senior government officials and elected representatives at rural bodies in a number of districts admitted that they were witnessing the exodus of workers, who...