India’s richest 1 per cent are four times wealthier than poorest 70%: Oxfam

Davos, January 20

India’s richest 1 per cent hold more than four times the wealth held by 953 million persons who make up for the bottom 70 per cent of the country’s population, while the total wealth of all Indian billionaires is more than the full-year budget, a new study said on Monday.

Releasing the study “Time to Care” here ahead of the 50th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), rights group Oxfam also said the world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion persons, who make up 60 per cent of the planet’s population.

The report flagged that global inequality is shockingly entrenched and vast and the number of billionaires has doubled in the last decade, despite their combined wealth having declined in the last year.

“The gap between rich and poor can’t be resolved without deliberate inequality-busting policies, and too few governments are committed to these,” said Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar, who is here to represent the Oxfam confederation this year.

The issues of income and gender inequality are expected to figure prominently in discussions at the five-day summit of the WEF, starting Monday.

The WEF’s annual Global Risks Report has also warned that the downward pressure on the global economy from macroeconomic fragilities and financial inequality continued to intensify in 2019.

Concern about inequality underlies recent social unrest in almost every continent, although it may be sparked by different tipping points such as corruption, constitutional breaches or the rise in prices for basic goods and services, as per the WEF report.

Although global inequality has declined over the past three decades, domestic income inequality has risen in many countries, particularly in advanced economies and reached historic highs in some, the Global Risks Report flagged last week.

The report said “sexist” economies were fuelling the inequality crisis by enabling wealthy elite to accumulate vast fortunes at the expense of ordinary people and particularly poor women and girls.

The report says it would take a female domestic worker 22,277 years to earn what a top CEO of a technology company makes in one year. Oxfam’s figures are based on data from Forbes magazine and Swiss bank Credit Suisse. — PTI