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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Rural Consumption Stays Sluggish; Weather poses risk to recovery - Gireesh Chandra Prasad
Livemint While India staged a double-digit rebound in household consumption in FY22 which is set to expand at over 7% this fiscal, experts point out that India’s consumption story has a weakness — rural folk tightening their belt in the face of inflation. The silver lining is that the worst may be over, unless El Nino conditions disrupt the arrival of the rains and dampen a consumption revival, experts said. Gross domestic product...
More »Real Wages Declined for Rural Indians in 2022, a Year When the Economy Somewhat Recovered
The year 2022 was supposed to mark the recovery of the Indian economy from the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns of the preceding two years. However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February pushed up prices of food, fuel and fertilizer worldwide. In India consumer price inflation, which had declined to under 5 percent in the September-November period of 2021, has steadily increased, staying above 6 percent throughout 2022. What happened to rural incomes in 2022? An...
More »Indian banks gave more home loans than agricultural credit
In each of the last three years – from 2020 through 2022 – Indian banks lent more money to retail customers purchasing homes than they did to farmers. In fiscal year (FY)2021-22 commercial banks gaveRs. 17.54 lakh crore worth of housing loans, while agriculture and allied activities got Rs. 15.16 lakh crore. That is nearly 14 percent less. In FY 2021 and FY 2020 – one of which saw a...
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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