The richest one percent in India now own more than 40 percent of the country’s total wealth, while half of the population together share just three percent of the wealth, a new study said.
Taxing India’s ten richest at 5 percent can fetch entire money to bring children back to school in the country, the report by the rights group Oxfam International said.
It released the India supplement of its annual inequality report on the first day of the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting, Indian wire service PTI reported.
India’s billionaires
“A one-off tax on unrealised gains from 2017–2021 on just one billionaire, Gautam Adani, could have raised $21.9 billion (₹1,790 billion) enough to employ more than five million Indian primary school teachers for a year,” said the report titled ‘Survival of the Richest’.
According to the Oxfam report, if India’s billionaires are taxed once at two percent on their entire wealth, it would support the requirement of ₹404 billion for the nutrition of malnourished in the country for the next three years.
Mentioning gender inequality, the report stated that female workers earned only 63 paise for every 1 rupee a male worker earned.
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For Scheduled Castes and rural workers, the difference is even starker — the former earned 55 percent of what the advantaged social groups earned, and the latter earned only half of the urban earnings between 2018 and 2019, the report revealed.
“Taxing the top 100 Indian billionaires at 2.5 percent, or taxing the top 10 Indian billionaires at 5 percent would nearly cover the entire amount required to bring the children back into school,” it said.
Oxfam said the report is a mix of qualitative and quantitative information to explore the impact of inequality in India.
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 have been used to corroborate arguments made throughout the report.
Oxfam said the total number of billionaires in India increased from 102 in 2020 to 166 in 2022. The combined wealth of India’s 100 richest has touched $660 billion, an amount that could fund the country’ Union Budget for more than 18 months, it added.
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