India’s richest 1pc has highest concentration of wealth in decades, study shows

NEW DELHI: The wealth concentrated in the richest 1 percent of India’s population is at its highest in six decades and the percentage share of income exceeds that of countries including Brazil and the United States, research group the World Inequality Lab found.

Since India, which won its independence in 1947 from Britain, opened its markets to foreign investment in 1992, its number of billionaires has surged.

“The ‘Billionaire Raj’ headed by India’s modern bourgeoisie is now more unequal than the British Raj headed by the colonialist forces,” the authors said.

By the end of 2023, India’s richest citizens owned 40.1% of the country’s wealth, the highest since 1961, and their share of total income was 22.6%, the most since 1922, the study, whose four authors included Nitin Kumar Bharti and Thomas Piketty, found.