INDIA'S GROWING WEALTH DIVIDE

THE FINDINGS HAVE REITERATED WHAT SEVERAL ECONOMISTS HAVE BEEN POINTING TO: THE STARK AND WIDENING WEALTH DIVIDE AMONG INDIANS, WITH THE PANDEMIC MAKING THINGS WORSE

- M.G. Arun

The rich-poor divide in India has never been a secret. If anything, it has only grown wider. The fact only got reaffirmed in a paper released recently by the World Inequality Lab, a Paris-based research organisation. The country’s top 1 per cent income and wealth shares have reached historical highs and are among the highest in the world. By FY2023, the findings reveal, the top 1 per cent of Indians held a 22.6 per cent share in the country’s income and 40 per cent of its wealth.

Inequality is said to have declined post-Independence till the early 1980s, after which it began rising and has skyrocketed since the early 2000s, according to the paper, titled ‘Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj’. The top 1 per cent earned an average of Rs 53 lakh per annum in FY23, as much as 23 times the average Indian, who earned Rs 2.3 lakh annually. Average annual incomes for the bottom 50 per cent and the middle 40 per cent stood at Rs 71,000 (0.3 times the national average) and Rs 1.65 lakh (0.7 times the national average), respectively. The richest 9,223 individuals (of 920 million Indian adults) earned an average of Rs 48 crore a year, or 2,069 times the average Indian’s income.