Friday Factly 14 May 2021

General Studies – 1

Women as elector and elected representative

• Women have been a mainstay of Banerjee’s support base in past elections; and analysis of the 2021 verdict suggests that 50 per cent women voted for Trinamool Congress compared to 37 per cent support for the BJP (Lokniti-CSDS).
• In these elections, for instance, women constituted only 10.4 per cent of candidates, and 8.5 per cent of MLAs.

Inequality

• According to National Sample survey Data only 4.4% rural household and 24% rural household have computers.
• Only 17% of rural areas and 42% of urban areas have internet.
• According to NCERT and Azim Premji and Oxfam suggest that between 27% and 60% could not access online classes
• For a range of reasons.
• India’s abysmally low public spending on health (barely 1% of GDP) bears repetition. Partly as a result, the share of‘out of pocket’ (OOP) health expenditure (of total health spending) in India was over 60% in 2018. Even in a highly privatized health system such as the United States, OOP was merely 10%

Children:

• According to UNICEF, India has over 30 million orphan and abandoned children

General Studies – 2

Rising cash usage

According to the data released by the Reserve Bank of India, the currency with public rose by Rs 15,919 crore in the fortnight ended April 23 to cross the Rs 28 lakh crore mark for the first time due to pandemic and lockdown.

Achievements in welfare schemes since 2014

• 11.35 crore household toilets got built under the Swachh Bharat Mission after October 2, 2014. Likewise, 42.31 crore bank accounts were opened under Jan Dhan Yojana (launched in August 2014), 8.03 crore free LPG connections released under Ujjwala (May 2016) and 2.63 crore households electrified under Saubhagya (October 2017). Besides, 2.11 crore rural houses were constructed between 2014-15 and 2020-21 under Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana (PMAY) and 2.82 lakh km of road length completed under Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY).
• Only 18,734 out of the country’s total 21.45 crore rural households are still to be electrified; LPG penetration has risen from 56 per cent in 2015 to 99.5 per cent in 2020; and 100 per cent of village homes now have toilets, as against 38.7 per cent in October 2014.

Exports

• India’s agricultural exports grew 17.5 per cent to cross $41.8 billion in 2020-21. This came even as the country’s overall merchandise exports fell 7.2 per cent to $290.8 billion, from $313.4 billion in 2019-20.
• The farm sector’s standout export performance, the best since the $43.25 billion of 2013-14, was thanks to a good monsoon, agriculture production being relatively unaffected by the Covid-19-induced lockdown, and a steep surge in global commodity prices.

Agricultural growth for 2020-21 is estimated at 3 per cent, even as the Indian economy contracted by 6.5 per cent

• The World Bank, in its latest Migration and Development Brief, said despite COVID-19, remittance flows remained resilient in 2020, registering a smaller decline than previously projected.
• India received $83 billion in remittances in 2020 (drop of just 0.2 per cent from the previous year). In 2019, India had received USD83.3 billion in remittances (much of the decline due to a 17 per cent drop in remittances from the United Arab Emirates).
• China, which received USD 59.5 billion in remittances in 2020 against USD 68.3 billion the previous year, is a distant second
• India and China are followed by Mexico (USD42.8 billion), the Philippines (USD34.9 billion), Egypt (USD29.6 billion), Pakistan (USD26 billion), France (USD24.4 billion) and Bangladesh (USD21 billion).

 General Studies – 3

Space Tourism market

UBS estimates the space tourism market to be worth $3 billion by 2030.

State of Working India 2021 Report (Employment, rising inequality)

• The COVID-19 pandemic has substantially increased informality in employment, leading to a decline in earnings for the majority of workers, and consequent increase in poverty in the country.
• 100 million jobs were lost nationwide during the April-May 2020 lockdown.
• Though most of these workers had found employment by June 2020, about 15 million remained out of work. As for income, “for an average household of four members, the monthly per capita income in Oct 2020 (₹4,979) was still below its level in Jan 2020 (₹5,989),” the report noted.
• post-lockdown, nearly half of salaried workers had moved into informal work, either as self-employed (30%), casual wage (10%) or informal salaried (9%).
• Education, health and professional services saw the highest exodus of workers into other sectors, with agriculture, construction and petty trade emerging as the top fallback options. For Hindus, agriculture was the major fallback sector, absorbing 10-20% of workers from other sectors, while for Muslims, it was trade, absorbing 20-35% of workers from other sectors.
• Due to the employment and income losses, the labour share of the GDP fell by 5 percentage points, from 32.5% in the second quarter of 2019-20 to 27% in the second quarter of 2020-21.
• Of the decline in income, 90% was due to reduction in earnings, while 10% was due to loss of employment.
• Monthly earnings of workers fell on an average by 17% during the pandemic, with self-employed and informal salaried workers facing the highest loss of earnings.
• While the poorest 20% of households lost their entire incomes in April-May 2020, “the richer households suffered losses of less than a quarter of their pre-pandemic incomes.
• A 10% decline in mobility was associated with 7.5% decline in income.
• During the lockdown and in the post-lockdown months, 61% of working men remained employed while 7% lost their job and did not return to work. But in the case of women, only 19% remained employed while 47% suffered a permanent job loss.
• About 33% of workers in the 15-24 years age group had failed to regain some form of employment even by December 2020. The corresponding figure for those in the 25-44 years category was 6%.
• With 230 million falling below the national minimum wage threshold of ₹375 per day during the pandemic, poverty rate has “increased by 15 percentage points in rural and nearly 20 percentage points in urban areas