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...

Reuters Unseasonal rains and hailstorms have damaged ripening, winter-planted crops such as wheat in India's fertile northern, central and western plains, exposing thousands of farmers to losses and raising the risk of further food price inflation. Torrential rains on Sunday and Monday lashed Punjab, Haryana parts of Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh state, which account for the bulk of wheat output in India, the world's biggest producer after China, flattening crops and...

-Newsclick.in Many farmers also brought uprooted electric meters from their tube wells, dumped them on the premises of PVVNL and asked the officials to deposit them in the office. Lucknow: Farmers from across Western Uttar Pradesh intensified their ongoing protest by allegedly holding government officials hostage for several hours inside the Paschim Vidyut Vitran Nigam Ltd (PVVNL) under the banner of Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU). The protest is against installing electric meters...

-The Hindu In Punjab, a project to use of paddy straw to produce compressed bio gas is one that is replicable across India, and can transform the rural economy The beginnings of a renewable energy revolution rooted in agriculture are taking shape in India with the first bio-energy plant of a private company in Sangrur district of Punjab having commenced commercial operations on October 18. It will produce Compressed Bio Gas (CBG)...

-The Hindu Any state intervention inspired by Islamophobic views will only help deepen majoritarianism The Uttar Pradesh government’s decision to undertake a survey of madrasas has raised serious concerns not just over the fate of these institutions but also on the future of Muslim identity. Other BJP-ruled States have also expressed concerns about madrasas. In May, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said the word ‘madrasa’ should cease to exist. In September,...