The wealth concentrated in the richest 1% 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.

In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was elected on a mandate for development and economic reforms. His critics say his last two terms in office have been characterised by a widening gap between rich and the rural poor as India’s economy grew at 8.4%, its fastest in one-and-half years, in the final three months of 2023…. Read more at:
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/indias-richest-1-has-highest-concentration-of-wealth-in-decades-study-shows/articleshow/108650367.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

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