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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Wealth in India: The poor do not count -Manas Chakravarty

Wealth in India: The poor do not count -Manas Chakravarty

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published Published on Apr 12, 2017   modified Modified on Apr 12, 2017
-Livemint.com

The richest household’s assets are worth much more than that of all the others combined and the same conclusion holds if we take the distribution of rural assets

We all know that Credit Suisse reckons that the richest 1% of Indians own 58.4% of the nation’s wealth, up from 36.8% in 2000. What is perhaps not so well-known is that, according to the Credit Suisse report, the bottom 70% of Indians together now own just 7% of the country’s wealth. That is down from 13.9% in 2010.

But do we have other domestic estimates of the wealth divide? Cast your eyes on Chart 1. It’s taken from the National Sample Survey Office’s report on Household Capital Expenditure in India. The chart shows the average value of assets held by each ‘household asset holding class’. A household asset holding class is defined as ‘the 10 decile classes of the rural/urban All-India distribution of households by asset holding size’. This means that decile 1 in the chart comprises the poorest 10% of households in terms of their holding of assets. Similarly, decile 10 denotes the richest tenth of households in terms of asset ownership. Almost all physical and financial assets are included.

There are several interesting facts about Chart 1. The average value of assets held by a household in decile 10 in urban India, or the richest 10%, is Rs1.5 crore. That is 50,034 times the average value of assets held by an urban household in the lowest decile. It’s 18.7 times the average value of assets held by a household in the 6th decile. And it’s 4.1 times the average value of assets held by a household in the ninth decile, one rung lower than the top 10%. What’s more, these are just the official figures— God only knows how much more skewed these numbers would be if we found some way to include undeclared wealth in the data.

If we count the assets of the poor, we find the poor do not count.

That’s not all. Let’s assume that we have ten households, one in each decile, which has the average assets in that decile. The household in the poorest decile — decile 1—will then have Rs291, the one in decile 2 assets worth Rs9,565 and so on. The richest household will then have assets worth Rs1.5 crore. But if we add up the total value of assets held by all the rest, that is the other nine households, that amounts to Rs82,90,418. In other words, the richest household’s assets are worth much more than that of all the others combined. The same conclusion holds if we take the distribution of rural assets.

Of course, if the distribution of assets is so skewed, so too will be the return or income from these assets.

Now, let’s take a look at consumption. Chart 2, taken from the report ‘Key indicators of Household Consumer Expenditure in India’, shows the monthly per capita expenditure of the different classes, from the poorest 5% to the richest 5%.

Please click here to read more.

Livemint.com, 7 April, 2017, http://www.livemint.com/Politics/XMCFbsPaUbHm8iQsRjalzO/The-poor-do-not-count.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_v2


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