The Wealth Paradox

HOW RICH DO YOU HAVE TO BE in order to belong to India's super-rich? According to a recent survey, The Rise of the Billionaire Raj by co-authors Bharti, Chancel, Piketty and Somanchi, to be part of the top 0.1 per cent of the Indian population (roughly one million people) you would need a net annual income of Rs 2.25 crore.

- Minhaz Merchant

The survey raised a controversy when it was first published last year. One of its authors, French economist Thomas Piketty, has long argued that India is one of the world's most unequal societies. That is obviously true but in their survey spanning 100 years from 1922 to 2023 Piketty and his co-authors ignore the historical context of India's extreme impoverishment under British colonial rule.

In 1947, inequality in India was stark. On the one hand were over 500 Maharajas and the Nizam - reputedly the wealthiest man in the world at the time - and on the other was a nation the British had impoverished so ruthlessly over 190 years of colonial rule that the Indian poverty rate at Independence was a horrific 80 per cent.

Under decades of Nehruvian socialism, poverty reduced only glacially. It wasn't until the Narasimha Rao-Manmohan Singh economic liberalisation of the 1990s that inequality began to fall. While the purpose of The Rise of the Billionaire Raj survey is to burnish the provocative arguments of Piketty and his co-authors, the report does deliver some insights.

How Many Indians Belong To The Super-Rich Category?

How many Indians belong to the 0.1 per cent super-rich category? According to the survey, just 9,20,000. The top one per cent of Indians are defined as those with an annual income of 20.7 lakh. They number a paltry 9.2 million. The numbers broaden as the top 10 per cent of the wealthy are taken into account. There are 130 million Indians in this category but the qualifying income parameter is set low: Rs 2.9 lakh per year.