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...

There is some respite expected for India in terms of prices of imported commodities. This may ease the depletion of its foreign exchange reserves. The country has faced a widening of its merchandise trade deficit from US$ -17.91 billion to US$ -26.91 billion between October 2021 and October 2022. The commodity price data provided by the World Bank in December 2022 (termed as The Pink Sheet) shows that energy prices plummeted by...

-The Hindu Policymakers can ill-afford to drop their guard in the fight against inflation October’s inflation data point to a welcome softening in price gains that should offer some succour to monetary policy authorities, who have been battling to rein in runaway inflation since the beginning of this year. Retail inflation, or price gains based on the Consumer Price Index, slowed to 6.77% last month, from September’s 7.41%, aided by an appreciable...

-Scroll.in Less than half the malnourished children admitted at the district’s nutrition rehabilitation centres since 2021 have gained the targeted weight. Chandni Patle placed Bau Pawara, a feeble-looking 17-month-old baby, on an electronic weighing machine. The child, with bony limbs, was quiet and inactive – unusual for toddlers his age. It was early September, and this was his fourth check-up in two months at the nutrition rehabilitation centre in Dhadgaon, in Maharashtra’s...

-IndiaToday.in More women voted for the BJP than men in all four states that the party won in the recently concluded Assembly elections, according to the data. Here's why. The story of women voting in India has added one more puzzle for social scientists to decipher. In the past decade, the research largely focused on the increasing voter registration among women and their higher turnout rate at polling booths. The combined effect...