The Oxfam report that was presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos highlights the increase in economic inequality during the pandemic. “If Indian billionaires were taxed at a rate of 2% of their total wealth, the undernourished people of the country could be fed for the next three years.”
Mumbai () – The richest 1% of the Indian population owns more than 40.5% of the country’s wealth, while the lowest 50% of the income group owns just 3% of total wealth. These figures correspond to India for the year 2021 in the report on inequality that Oxfam International presents each year at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The investigation crosses data obtained from sources such as Forbes and Credit Suisse on high net worth individuals with official documents on the Indian Union budget.
The study shows that, since the start of the pandemic, Indian billionaires have increased their wealth by 121%, equivalent to 36,000 million rupees per day (more than 400 million euros). If you look at the top 5% of Indians, the proportion of wealth they own rises to 60%.
The report says that if the wealth of the 10 richest people in India were taxed at 5%, the full amount of money needed to tackle the problem of school dropouts could be raised. And he adds: “A single tax on the profits from 2017 to 2021 of a single billionaire, Gautam Adani (one of the richest men in the world, ndr.), would contribute 1.79 billion dollars, enough to hire in India to more than five million primary school teachers in one year.
The Survival of the Richest report also points out that if Indian billionaires paid even once at a rate of 2% of their total wealth, it would raise 404.23 billion rupees (more than 4.5 billion euros), which that would make it possible to feed the malnourished people of the country for the next three years.
It also refers to gender inequality: female workers earn just 63 cents for every rupee that male workers earn and the difference is even starker for classified castes and rural workers: the former earn only 55% of what they earn. the favored groups, while the latter earn only half of the urban income in the period 2018-19.
Indian economist Kaushik Basu, former chief economist at the World Bank, tweeted: “Oxfam’s latest annual report is disturbing. In the last two years there has been a sharp increase in inequality. We need fiscal policy to reverse the trend.”
