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

Davos: 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 said that the number of billionaires since the global financial crisis has nearly doubled with a new billionaire created every two days.
“Over the last year, the total wealth of India has increased by US$ 625.5 billion. The wealth of the top 1% increased by 46% while the bottom 50% saw wealth increase at just 3%.,” the report said.
Analysis of billionaire wealth showed that there are 15 billionaires from the consumer goods industry and more than 10 billionaires from the pharmaceuticals industry in 2019.Another figure that shows growing inequality in the country is that the wealth of top 9 billionaires is equivalent to the wealth of the bottom 50% of the population.
Persistent inequality has negative implications for macroeconomic stability and inclusive economic growth. Wealth concentrations can lead to decision-making power being restricted to a few while also resulting in significant adverse social impacts such as rising crime, the report noted.
“Rising inequality also compromises the pace of poverty reduction and compounds inequalities between various social groups such as men and women in terms of access to health, education, and opportunities,” it said.
According to the report, it would take a female domestic worker 22,277 years to earn what a top CEO of a technology company makes in one year. With earnings pegged at ₹106 per second, a tech CEO would make more in 10 minutes than what an average domestic worker would make in one year.