Richest 1% own over 40% of India's wealth: Oxfam
Davos, January 16
The richest one per cent in India now own more than 40 per cent of the country’s total wealth, while the bottom half of the population together share just 3 per cent of wealth, a new study showed on Monday.
Editorial: Worsening inequality
Tax billionaires
Taxing the top 100 Indian billionaires at 2.5 per cent, or taxing the top 10 Indian billionaires at 5% would nearly cover the entire amount required to bring the children back into school. The report
Social inequality
- Women workers earn only 63 paise for every 1 rupee a male worker earns
- Scheduled Castes earn 55% of what the advantaged social groups earn
- Rural workers, between 2018 and 2019, got only half of the urban earnings
121% or Rs 3,608 crore per day surge in wealth of billionaires in India between 2020 and November 2022
166 total number of billionaires in 2022. In 2020, it was 102
Releasing the India supplement of its annual inequality report on the first day of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting here, rights group Oxfam International said taxing India’s 10-richest at 5 per cent could fetch entire money to bring children back to school.
“A one-off tax on unrealised gains from 2017-2021 on just one billionaire, Gautam Adani, could have raised Rs 1.79 lakh crore, enough to employ more than five million Indian primary school teachers for a year,” it said.
The report titled ‘Survival of the Richest’ further said if India’s billionaires were taxed once at 2 per cent
on their entire wealth, it would support the requirement of Rs 40,423 crore for the nutrition of malnourished in the country for the next three years.
“A one-time tax of 5 per cent on the 10 richest billionaires in the country (Rs 1.37 lakh crore) is more than 1.5 times the funds estimated by the Health and Family Welfare Ministry (Rs 86,200 crore) and the Ministry of Ayush (Rs 3,050 crore) for the year 2022-23,” it added.
On gender inequality, the report said female workers earned only 63 paise for every 1 rupee a male worker earned.
For Scheduled Castes and rural workers, the difference is even starker. The former earned 55 per cent of what the advantaged social groups earned, and the latter earned only half of the urban earnings between 2018 and 2019.
Secondary sources like Forbes and Credit Suisse have been used to look at the wealth inequality and billionaire wealth in the country, while government sources like NSS, Union budget documents, parliamentary questions, etc have been used to corroborate arguments made throughout the report.
Since the pandemic begun to November 2022, billionaires in India have seen their wealth surge by 121 per cent or Rs 3,608 crore per day in real terms, Oxfam said.
Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar said, “The country’s marginalised — Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, women and informal sector workers are continuing to suffer in a system which ensures the survival of the richest.
