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...
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Lok Sabha Standing Committee Concerned about Reduction in MGNREGA Budget, Recommends Increase
A report released by a Parliamentary standing committee has expressed concern over the reduction of funds for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). The report by the Lok Sabha Standing Committee on Rural Development and Panchayati Raj released on 14 March, 2023 said that the Budget Estimates for MGNREGS has been reduced by Rs. 29,400 Crore for 2023-24 when compared to the Revised Estimates of 2022-23. The report said...
More »Rural distress increased sharply as farm wages fell - Santosh Mehrotra
- 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...
More »jobless Numbers Are Touching 5 Crore -Subodh Varma
-Newsclick.in Labour force has still not recovered to pre-pandemic levels, according to CMIE. Latest estimates put the number of unemployed in India at over 5 crore. This is just short of the heights reached during 2020, the first year of the pandemic, which saw recurring lockdowns and a shutdown of the economy. These estimates, made by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), are drawn from periodic sample surveys carried out by...
More »Instead of Withdrawing Food Security, a Minimum Income Guarantee Is Needed -Santosh Mehrotra, Anjana Rajagopalan and Rakesh Ranjan
-TheWire.in A Minimum Income Guarantee would not just cushion exogenous shocks, but would arrest the process of vulnerability begetting vulnerability. While the worst of the pandemic is behind us, there has been a decline in general purchasing power amidst inflation. The provisional Consumer Food Price Index (combined for rural and urban) for September 2022 is pegged at 8.6%, a huge increase from 0.68% for September 2021. The latest Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS)...
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