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...

-The Telegraph State is working to plug all loopholes in MGNREGA execution: Source Calcutta: The Mamata Banerjee government has taken up the task of verifying over 2.3 crore job cards, which make people eligible to work under the rural employment guarantee scheme, in an apparent attempt to weed out “bogus cards”, which, according to the Opposition, were issued to misappropriate central funds. The initiative, sources said, is the fallout of the strict monitoring...

-The Telegraph The activists flagged a reply by the Jharkhand food, and civil supplies department during the monsoon session about payment of food security allowances Jamshedpur: Food security activists in Jharkhand are pained at the difference between the government's claim in the state Assembly on the implementation of the National Food Security Act, 2013, and stark realities at the ground level. The activists have flagged a reply by the Jharkhand food, and civil...

-News18.com The Modi govt has introduced quality-cum-cost based selection as a mode for awarding contracts, which means lowest-cost bid is no longer the chief criterion If the quality of execution has not always been regarded as the forte of public works in India, a key reason is the tendering guidelines, which said that contracts have to go to the lowest bidder. However, this stipulation, known as the L1 approach, is now no...

-Article-14.com Talks to restart the political process in Jammu and Kashmir did not include its forgotten people: a teenager who disappeared, a murdered shopkeeper and a detained politician, whose cases have been brought to New Delhi’s attention by the United Nations. We tracked down stories the government does not discuss. Srinagar: Mohammad Hussian Wani, 55, does not know that United Nations human-rights experts have mentioned the name of his son, Naseer Ahmad...