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 Labourers from Jharkhand’s West Singhbhum district on Saturday staged a demonstration at a block after being denied work under the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Act (MGNREGA) for the last few months. The mandate of the MGNREGA  is to provide at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a  financial year to every rural household.  “Villagers from across all the 11 panchayats in the Sonua block have been complaining for the...

-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    Musahar community is among the most marginalised and backward communities and comes under the Scheduled Caste category Jamshedpur: The doorstep delivery campaign of Jharkhand chief minister Hemant Soren, held between October and November this year, has led to the musahar (rat-eating) community being linked with government welfare schemes for the first time in Jharkhand’s Garhwa district. Musahar community is among the most marginalised and backward communities and comes under...

Online teaching was perhaps the most preferred mode (of the policymakers) for imparting education to school children in the last two years when schools faced closures thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was promoted by both the Central and State Governments when mobility almost came to a standstill (or got restricted in comparison to normal times) during the last two years. However, various studies (a list of those studies is...