The mindboggling concessions given to the super-rich discussed in the previous article of this budget series have led to a massive increase in their wealth. This article presents some estimates of the wealth of our super-rich, which has made India one of the most unequal countries in the world.
The mindboggling concessions given to the super-rich discussed in the previous article of this budget series have led to a massive increase in their wealth.
When the Modi Government came to power in 2014, the Forbes’ list[1] had 56 Indian billionaires, with a combined wealth of $191.5 billion.[2] A decade later, there were 200 Indians on the 2024 Forbes’ list of the world’s billionaires. Their combined wealth is approaching a trillion dollars, with a record total of $954 billion. India now has the third largest number of billionaires in the world, behind USA and China.[3] This is equivalent to Rs 79.71 lakh crore.[Average value of US dollar to Indian rupee for January to November 2024 is Rs 83.55.] This amount is equivalent to a quarter of India’s GDP for 2024.
In October, Forbes’ reported that the total net worth of India’s 100 wealthiest tycoons has tripled in the last decade and their wealth had crossed $1 trillion.
Chart 1: India: Networth of 100 Richest Indians, 2014–2024 ($ billion)[4]
Another well-known list of the world’s billionaires is the Hurun Rich List, published by Hurun Report, a research, publishing and events group based in London. The Hurun India Rich List publishes a list of Indians with net worth of more than Rs 1000 crore. The total number of ultra-wealthy on this list has gone up by 4 times during the Modi years — from 230 in 2014 to 1,539 in 2024.[5] Anas Rahman Junaid, Chief Researcher of Hurun India, says that “ “Assuming that for every one Hurun rich lister we have found, we have probably missed two, India today likely has 5,000 individuals worth Rs 1,000 crore.”[6]
At the same time, even official reports by international agencies admit that India also has the largest number of poor people in the world. According to a recent report by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) based at the University of Oxford, India accounts for a quarter of the total people in the world living in acute poverty — 234 million out of 1.1 billion.[7] We have pointed out in an earlier article that this figure is a gross underestimate, and that more than half of the country’s population is living in poverty.
Deepening Inequality: The Billionaire Raj
A more accurate estimation of the deepening inequality between the rich and poor in India because of the corporate plunder of the country’s wealth and natural resources facilitated by the Modi Government has been made in a recent study published by the World Inequality Lab titled ‘Income and Wealth Inequality in India 1922–2023: The Rise of The Billionaire Raj’. The study says that India has today become one of the most unequal countries in the world:
>> By the end of 2023, India’s richest 1% people had a 22.6% share of national income, the highest in over a century, while the bottom 50% of the population had a 15% share.
>> Wealth inequality in India is also near historic highs: by the end of 2023, India’s richest citizens owned 40.1 per cent of the country’s wealth, the highest since 1961, while the bottom 50% owned only 6.4% of the total wealth.[8]
The paper is authored by Thomas Piketty (Paris School of Economics and World Inequality Lab), Lucas Chancel (Harvard Kennedy School and World Inequality Lab) and Nitin Kumar Bharti (New York University and World Inequality Lab). The authors say: “The ‘Billionaire Raj’ headed by India’s modern bourgeoisie is now more unequal than the British Raj headed by the colonialist forces.”[9]
Income Inequality
We give two tables from the above mentioned study to give a sense of how skewed income distribution has become in the country. Table 1 presents a summary of the income inequality in India in 2022–23. In Chart 2, we present the same data in a graphical format — it helps bring out the inequality more sharply. As can be seen from Table 1:
>> The share of national income going to the top 10% has reached astonishingly high levels and is touching 60% in recent years (it was 57.7% in 2022).
>> Within the top 10%, there is an increasing concentration of wealth at the very top:
>> The top 1% shares reached an all-time high of 22.6% in 2022.
>> The top 0.1% earned nearly 10% of the national income.
>> The figures for the top 0.01% and top 0.001% were 4.3% and 2.1% respectively.
>> At the other end of the distribution, the bottom 50% were getting only 15% of India’s national income in 2022–23.
Table 1: Income Inequality in India, 2022–23 [10]
Table 1 also shows that the income inequality in the country is so stark that:
>> It takes just 2.9 lakhs per year to make it to the top 10% of income earners; and
>> 20.7 lakhs to make it to the top 1%.
>> In contrast, the median adult earns only around 1 lakh — that is, if you are earning Rs 1 lakh per year, you enter the top 50% of the income earners;
>> while the poorest of the poor have virtually no incomes.
Chart 2: Income Inequality in India, 2022–23 [11]
The gap between the average income of the rich and the poor is staggering:
>> the bottom 50% have an average income of just around Rs 70,000 per year (which works out to less than Rs 6,000 per month);
>> the top 0.1% comprising 9.2 lakh adults have an average income of Rs 2.25 crore per annum; and
>> the top 0.001% (the richest ∼ 10,000 individuals) have an average annual income of Rs 48.5 crore.
Wealth Inequality
Table 2 summarises the findings of the World Inequality Lab study on wealth inequality in India, and Chart 3 presents it in graphic format. A comparison of Table 1 and 2 makes it evident that wealth inequality in the country is even more severe:
>> The share of the top 10% in the total national wealth has increased to 65% in 2022–23.
>> Within the top 10%, there is an increasing concentration of wealth at the very top. In 2022–23, of the total national wealth:
>> the top 1% wealth share was 39.5%;
>> the top 0.1% had a share of 29%;
>> the top 0.01% had a share of 22%; and
>> just the top 0.001% had a share of 16%.
>> At the opposite end, the share of the bottom 50% in the total national wealth had fallen to just 6% in 2023.
Table 2: Wealth Inequality in India, 2022–23 [12]
Table 2 shows that wealth inequality in the country is so appalling that the median adult holds just Rs 4.3 lakh worth of wealth — this means that if you own wealth totalling Rs 4.3 lakh wealth, you are in the top 50% of the wealth owners.
Chart 3: Wealth Inequality in India, 2022–23 [13]
The wealth gap between the richest and the poorest is simply stunning
>> the top 0.1% have an average wealth of Rs 40 crore.
>> the wealthiest ∼ 10,000 individuals out of 92 crore Indian adults own an average of Rs 2,260 crore in wealth;
>> while the bottom 50% (46 crore individuals) have an average wealth of Rs 1.7 lakh;
>> and the poorest have almost no wealth.
The authors of this report point out that even these figures of extreme income and wealth concentration are only conservative estimates:
[O]ur benchmark estimates are plausibly conservative in the sense that we might be underestimating the true extent of income and wealth concentration in recent years.
For instance, we are unable to account for offshore wealth when estimating the wealth distribution. We know, however, that over 1% of India’s GDP worth of wealth is parked as offshore assets by Indians in Dubai alone. Further, Indians account for over 20% of all foreign-owned real estate in Dubai. These strongly indicate that we are likely under-estimating wealth at the very top of the distribution.[14]
{Note that this income and wealth concentration is not entirely due to the Modi Government’s policies. The Modi Government’s economic policies have only accelerated this income and wealth concentration. In our budget analysis article series, we have focussed only on the economic policies of the past decade in our book. But the reality is that this wealth concentration began with the onset of globalisation–liberalisation–privatisation or what is also known as neoliberal policies since the early 1990s, introduced by the Narsimha Rao – Manmohan Singh Congress government following the external debt crisis of 1990–91. The income concentration of the top 1% was only 10.2% in 1991, but because of neoliberal economic policies had doubled to 21.3% by 2014; likewise, the wealth concentration with the top 1% also doubled over the period 1991 to 2014, from 16.1% to 33.3%.[15]}
Notes
1. An annual ranking by documented net worth of the world’s wealthiest billionaires by the American business magazine, Forbes.
2. “Global Billionaire Wealth Scales New Heights; India Disappoints: Forbes”, 4 March 2014, https://www.thehindubusinessline.com.
3. “Indian Billionaires Soar to Record Highs”, 3 April 2024, https://www.forbes.com; “Forbes Richest World’s Billionaires List 2024”, https://www.forbes.com.
4. “India’s 100 Richest 2024: Fortunes Of Indian Tycoons Jump 40% Blowing Past $1 Trillion”, 9 October 2024, https://www.forbes.com.
5. “Hurun India Rich List 2024: Gautam Adani at #1, Billionaire Count Crosses 300, Cumulative Wealth & More”, 29 August 2024, https://www.livemint.com.
6. “Shah Rukh, Adani, Ambani in Hurun Rich List: Wealth of Indian billionaires more than GDP of Saudi Arabia & Switzerland”, 29 August 2024, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com.
7. “India Among Five Countries with Largest Number of People Living in Poverty: UN Report”, 18 October 2024, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com.
8. In the study, incomes refer to annual flows earned from individuals’ labor or flows generated by capital they own (e.g. rent, dividends, interests or retained earnings). These are measured before income taxes, i.e. pre-tax incomes. Wealth refers to stocks, that is the market value of assets owned by individuals (such as housing, equity or directly owned businesses) net of any debt.
9. Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, and Anmol Somanchi, “Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922–2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj”, March 18, 2024, https://wid.world.
10. Ibid., p. 40.
11. We have converted data from Table 1 into graphic format.
12. Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, and Anmol Somanchi, “Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922–2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj”, p. 40, op. cit.
13. We have converted data from Table 2 into graphic format.
14. Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, and Anmol Somanchi, “Towards Tax Justice & Wealth Redistribution in India: Proposals Based on Latest Inequality Estimates”, p. 4, World Inequality Lab, May 2024, https://wid.world.
15. Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, and Anmol Somanchi, “Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922–2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj”, pp. 71 and 76, op. cit.
Neeraj Jain is a social–political activist with an activist group called Lokayat in Pune, and is also the Associate Editor of ‘Janata Weekly’, a weekly print magazine and blog published from Mumbai. He is the author of several books, including ‘Globalisation or Recolonisation?’, ‘Nuclear Energy: Technology from Hell’, and ‘Education Under Globalisation: Burial of the Constitutional Dream’.
