- Thursday, May 02, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
Giving a glimpse of India’s serious economic inequality, a new report by Oxfam has said that the South Asian country’s top one per cent owned more than 40.5 per cent of its total wealth in 2021.
Last year, the number of billionaires in the country went up to 166 from 102 in 2020, the report added.
It also added that the country’s poor, on the other hand, “are unable to afford even basic necessities to survive”.
The charity called on India’s finance minister to levy a wealth tax on the ultra rich to address the “obscene” inequality, the BBC reported.
The report — Survival of The Richest — was released as the World Economic Forum kicked off in Davos, Switzerland, on Monday (16).
The report also highlighted the large disparity which is found in distribution of wealth in India, saying that more than 40 per cent of the wealth created in the country from 2012 to 2021 had gone to just one per cent of the population while only three per cent had trickled down to the bottom 50 per cent of the population.
In 2022, the wealth of India’s richest man Gautam Adani increased by 46 per cent, while the combined wealth of India’s 100 richest had touched $660 billion (£541 billion).
The same year, Adani was ranked the second-richest person in the world on the Bloomberg’s wealth index.
He also topped the list of people whose wealth saw the biggest rise globally during the year.
According to Oxfam, the country’s poor and middle class were taxed more than the rich.
Approximately 64 per cent of the total goods and services tax in the country, which was started by the government of prime minister Narendra Modi in 2017, came from the bottom 50 per cent of the population, while only four per cent came from the top 10 per cent, the report said.
“India is unfortunately on a fast track to becoming a country only for the rich,” Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar was quoted as saying.
“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.”
The rich currently benefited from reduced corporate taxes, tax exemptions, and other incentives, the report said.
To tackle this disparity, the charity asked India’s finance minister to implement progressive tax measures such as wealth tax in the upcoming budget which will be presented on February 1.
A two per cent tax on the entire wealth of India’s billionaires would aid the nutrition of the country’s malnourished population for the next three years, the report said.
It added a one per cent wealth tax could fund the National Health Mission, India’s largest healthcare scheme for more than a year and half.
It also said that taxing the top 100 Indian billionaires at 2.5 per cent or taxing the top 10 Indian billionaires at five per cent would nearly cover the entire amount needed to bring an estimated 150 million children back into school.
“It’s time we demolish the convenient myth that tax cuts for the richest result in their wealth somehow ‘trickling down’ to everyone else,” Gabriela Bucher, the executive director of Oxfam International, said.
Taxing the super-rich was important for “reducing inequality and resuscitating democracy”, she added.
