Richest 1% own 40.5% of India’s wealth, says new Oxfam report

BBC: India’s top one percent owned more than 40.5 percent of its total wealth in 2021, according to a new report by Oxfam.

In 2022, the number of billionaires in the country increased to 166, from 102 in 2020, the report said.
Meanwhile, it added that the poor in India “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 tackle this “obscene” inequality.

The report - Survival of The Richest - was released as the World Economic Forum began in Davos, Switzerland.
The report highlighted the large disparity in wealth distribution in India, saying that more than 40 percent of the wealth created in the country from 2012 to 2021 had gone to just one percent of the population while only 3 percent had trickled down to the bottom 50 percent.

In 2022, the wealth of India’s richest man Gautam Adani increased by 46 percent, while the combined wealth of India’s 100 richest had touched US $ 660 billion.

In 2022, 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 witnessed the maximum rise globally during the year. 
Meanwhile, the country’s poor and middle class were taxed more than the rich, Oxfam said. 

Approximately 64 percent of the total goods and services tax (GST) in the country came from the bottom 50 percent of the population, while only 4 percent came from the top 10 percent, the report said.
“India is unfortunately on a fast track to becoming a country only for the rich,” Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar said. 

“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 added.
To correct this disparity, the charity asked the finance minister to implement progressive tax measures such as wealth tax in the upcoming budget.

A 2 percent tax on the entire wealth of India’s billionaires would support the nutrition of the country’s malnourished population for the next three years, the report said.

A one percent wealth tax could fund the National Health Mission, India’s largest healthcare scheme for more than 1.5 years, it added.

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 an estimated 150 million children back into school, Oxfam said.
“It’s time we demolish the convenient myth that tax cuts for the richest result in their wealth somehow ‘trickling down’ to everyone else,” said Gabriela Bucher, Executive Director of Oxfam International.

Taxing the super-rich was necessary for “reducing inequality and resuscitating democracy”, she added.