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...

-Newslaundry.com The city is woefully ill-prepared, despite thousands of crores spent and warnings that went unheeded. Last week, Bengaluru was battered by rains that were unprecedented in scale and floods that were disastrous in impact. While the rains have abated, thousands living on the periphery of the Bellandur-Varthur lakes in east Bengaluru are still gripped by fear, worried that deliberately narrowed drains, encroachment of wetlands, and state apathy could trigger another round...

-Down to Earth The city's inadequate drainage system results in frequent flooding, it says Kolkata in West Bengal has something to cheer about: Its much-criticised public transport system got an elaborate mention in the third instalment of the sixth assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC). The most significant report on the global climate crisis referred to the city’s public transport network as an “illustrative case study” to showcase integrated...

-IndiaSpend.com/ Scroll.in In the 2022 Budget, the Centre proposed to earmark Rs 1-lakh crore in interest-free loans for states, some of which will be used for developing infrastructure. In May 2021, when Cyclone Yaas hit the eastern coast of India, a hospital in Bihar’s capital Patna was inundated in the floods and patients had nowhere to go. In September 2021, parts of the national capital, Delhi, were waterlogged because of heavy rains...

-TheWire.in Parties across the spectrum seem unwilling to take the issue seriously, experts and civil society experts say. Hyderabad: While Telangana chief minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) has touted Hyderabad as a ‘global city’, the capital was hit by flash floods earlier this week and has remained cut off from the rest of the world after major roads were washed away. Experts have attributed this turn of events to poor urban planning,...