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...

S.V. Subramanian, Mayanka Ambade, Smriti Sharma, Akhil Kumar, Rockli Kim The extent of food deprivation and insecurity among infants and young children—a critical phase for children's current and future health and well-being—in India is unknown. We estimate the prevalence of food deprivation among infants and young children in India and describe its evolution over time at sub-national levels. Data from five National Family Health Surveys (NFHS) conducted in 1993, 1999, 2006, 2016...

Livemint Wheat prices have started climbing again despite the government launching open market operations to reain in prices of the crucial commodity due to the unseasonal rains in key what-producing states. Wheat prices had shot up by 15% in 2022 accoding to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution, even before the OMOs. This comes as retail inflation continues to hover above the Reserve Bank of India's upper tolerance level,...

Demand for work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) inched up in February to scale an eight-month high, after a month-on-month fall in January, reflecting an uneven recovery in broader economic activities. According to rural development ministry data, 26.3 million individuals opted for work under the scheme in February, up 1.7% from the previous month. Demand for the work came from 21.2 million households, recording a 2.4%...

The year 2022 was supposed to mark the recovery of the Indian economy from the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns of the preceding two years. However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February pushed up prices of food, fuel and fertilizer worldwide. In India consumer price inflation, which had declined to under 5 percent in the September-November period of 2021, has steadily increased, staying above 6 percent throughout 2022.    What happened to rural incomes in 2022? An...