Even as India's poor 'are unable to afford basic necessities to survive', the rich are getting richer: Oxfam

A new report by the aid group Oxfam has revealed that in 2021, India’s top one per cent owned about half its wealth. It also showed that the number of billionaires in the country increased from 102 in 2020, to 166 in the year 2022. This is as per the report as the poor in India “are unable to afford even basic necessities to survive”.

Oxfam in its report titled ‘Survival of the Richest: The India Story,’ says that “inequalities are growing in India,” and that the impact of this is “especially stark at the margins of the Indian society, with some communities such as the Scheduled Tribes (STs) suffering from physical remoteness and systematic exclusion from the means to achieve vertical mobility.”

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As per the report, the concentration of wealth “continues to be around primordial characteristics such as caste,” and there is a “persistence of marginalisation” among the historically disadvantaged elements of the society who are still trapped in intergenerational poverty.

The report claims that following the COVID-19 pandemic, the bottom 50 per cent of the population in India has seen its “wealth chipped away”. Between May and December 2022, inflation consistently breached the six per cent statutory limit set out in the amended Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934.

By the year 2020, this chunk of the population accounted for a mere 13 per cent of the country’s national income, and less than three per cent of its total wealth.This is because the top 30 per cent has accumulatedmore than 90 per cent of the wealth, and among them, the top 10 per cent own more than 80 per cent of the wealth.

Oxfam's report also revealed that shockingly, the top five per cent have nearly 62 per cent of the wealth, while the top one per cent owns around 40.6 per cent of it.

The report goes on to say that the nation’s bottom 50 per cent pays six times more indirect tax than the wealthiest 10 per cent and says that “imposing a tax on the wealth of the richest” is a solution it has rallied behind for years.

(With inputs from agencies)

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