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...

- Deccan Herald Covid-19 reverse migration of labour added to joblessness A rise in self-employment and unpaid family labour three years into the Covid-19 pandemic even as wage rates fell is an indication that rural distress has risen, the economist Santosh Mehrotra writes. Economic distress was on an upward trajectory even before the Pandemic and the sudden arrival of millions of reverse migrants in 2020 added to the stock of unemployed people...

-TheWire.in In India’s growth trajectory, for over a decade, domestic private investment levels have remained consistently low and so has (domestic) manufacturing growth.  As per recent quarterly estimates, India’s growth rate slowed to 6.3% in the September quarter of 2022-23. There is evidence of a notable contraction in output of manufacturing that’s pulling down growth. This author has previously argued that quarterly growth estimates may not reveal the real state of an economy....

-ThePrint.in Three-fourths of the full-time workers on Indian farms are women because men move to cities. Yet, there was little attention to uplifting them and their finances. There was a time when women’s work in agriculture and animal husbandry was rarely counted. But according to the 2015-16 Agriculture Census, 11.72 per cent of the total operated area in the country was operated by female holders. Civil society assessments suggest that three-fourths of...

Contrary to the rising economic distress on the ground since the last few years, the official press release related to the fourth Annual Report on the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) at first glance seems to give a rosy picture about the employment situation in India.  Defined as the percentage of persons unemployed among the persons in the labour force, the unemployment rate in usual status (principal activity status + subsidiary economic activity status)...