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Poor Country With Affluent Elite, India Is Going Nowhere -Jayati Ghosh

- The India Cable/ TheWire.in

India is now one of the most unequal countries for both income and wealth inequality — and has shown the most rapid increases in inequality.

The Paris-based World Inequality Lab has become a major source of data on global inequality, based on careful aggregation of national data from a multitude of sources, of both income and wealth inequality, at national, regional and global levels. Their latest World Inequality Report 2022 is an eye-opener, even for those who know that economic inequality has increased massively in recent years. It shows that globally, inequality is now as great as it was at the pinnacle of Western imperialism in the early 20th century. The process began nearly four decades ago, but worsened during the pandemic, which sharply exposed and amplified existing inequalities.

India is now one of the most unequal countries for both income and wealth inequality — and has shown the most rapid increases in inequality. This emerges clearly even though, as the report laments, “Over the past three years, the quality of inequality data released by the government has seriously deteriorated, making it particularly difficult to assess recent inequality changes.” We know that the central government has tended to suppress inconvenient information and manipulate data, refusing to release the results of the 2017-18 national consumer expenditure survey and playing fast and loose with definitions to artificially increase the number of ‘formal’ workers.

Despite these desperate efforts to hide the actual patterns, certain trends are unmistakable. By 2020, the income share of the bottom half of the Indian population was estimated to have fallen to only 13%, while the top 10% captured 57% of national income and the top 1% alone got 22%.

In terms of wealth distribution, the reality is even starker. We know that the past few decades have been a period of increasing wealth concentration globally: the top 1% captured nearly two-fifths of all global wealth growth. The wealth of the top 52 billionaires (which include our home-grown Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani) increased by nearly 10% each year between 1995 and 2001. In India, the rate of increase of private wealth and its concentration at the top have been even sharper. The poorest half of the population have less than 6% of the wealth, the top 1% grab more than one-third and the top 10% nearly two-thirds.

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