The Niti Aayog recently released its National Multidimensional Poverty Index 2023, according to which the poverty headcount ratio declined from 24.85 percent in 2015-16 to 14.96 percent in 2019-21. In absolute numbers this translates to 135 million people exiting multidimensional poverty in this time period. In addition, a few days earlier, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released its own Multidimensional Poverty Index, which in a press note said that,...

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 National Sample Survey Organization's Multiple Indicator Survey - part of the 78th round - has revealed that only 39.1 percent of all Indian households have access to drinking water within the  dwelling. When it come to cooking, 46.7% of rural households use firewood.  These are some of the findings of the survey whose purpose was to collect data about the indicators of Sustainable Development Goals. Data was collected for households...

The World Food and Agriculture – Statistical Yearbook 2022, released in December 2022, provides its readers a plethora of useful statistics and data across the countries pertaining to agriculture and food security. The yearbook by Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) primarily covers four themes -- Economic Dimensions of Agriculture; Production, Trade and Prices of Commodities; Food Security and Nutrition; and Sustainability and Environmental Aspects of Agriculture.  While going through the report,...

-India Spend India's transition to sustainable farming has to be calibrated and orchestrated well, drawing lessons from the successes of India's Green Revolution and the recent crisis in Sri Lanka, says sustainable farming expert P.S. Vijayshankar Bengaluru: The production-centric intensive agriculture brought about by India's Green Revolution in the 1960s, using high-yielding seeds, fertilisers and high levels of groundwater utilisation, helped India achieve food self-sufficiency by the 1970s, but has created a...