In March, World Inequality Lab, a global research centre focused on inequality and public policies, published a working paper titled, ‘Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj’. The authors — Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, and Anmol Somanchi — combined data from national income accounts, wealth aggregates, tax tabulations, rich lists, and surveys on income, consumption, and wealth to present their results.
Income and wealth inequality
First, let’s look at income inequality. By 2022-23, the report states, 22.6% of India’s national income went to just the top 1% in the country, the highest in the last 100 years. And just the top 0.1% of the population earned nearly 10% of the national income in India. The share of the top 1% in the national income is among the highest in the world.
