Growing inequality a ticking time bomb

India's richest 1% own more than 40% of total wealth: Oxfam

NT Corresondent

New Delhi: 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.

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 that taxing India's ten-richest at 5 per cent can fetch entire money to bring children back to school.

"A one-off tax on unrealized 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 added. The report titled 'Survival of the Richest' further said that if India's billionaires are 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 that 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.

"Taxing the top 100 Indian billionaires at 2.5 per cent, or taxing the top 10 Indian billionaires at 5 per cent would nearly cover the entire amount required to bring the children back into school," it added. Since the pandemic begun to Nov 2022, billionaires in India have seen their wealth surge by 121 percent.