India’s 1-percent grabs nearly a quarter of all income
By
Saman Gunadasa and Kranti Kumara
6 November 2017
The corporate press around the world have long depicted India as a rising economic star whose population, or at least a sizeable portion of it, is benefiting from rapid capitalist growth. Hundreds of millions, or so we have been told, are on the cusp of “middle class” incomes.
A recent report from French economists Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty debunks this distorted and cynical picture, showing that the economic development of the past three decades has overwhelmingly benefited the top 10 percent and especially the top 1 percent of Indian income-earners.
Chancel and Piketty present their analysis in a 50-page report, Indian income inequality, 1922-2014: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?, the updated version of which was released in September.
Using tax data, beginning with 1922, the year the colonial overlords of British India introduced an income tax, Chancel and Piketty show that income inequality is greater today than any time in the last century.
The top 1 percent of income-earners capture 23 percent of all income, nearly quadrupling their income share from the early 1980s, and the top 10 percent garner well over half of all income, 55 percent.
Meanwhile, the poorest 50 percent of Indians must make do with an income share of just 15 percent, eking out their existence on an average annual income of US $705.
The income data analyzed by the authors covers India’s adult population, defined as persons 20 years and older and estimated in 2014 to number about 780 million out of a total population of 1.26 billion. India it should be noted has the world’s largest number of child workers aged between 5 and 14 years of age.
According to the report,…