India’s 119 billionaires saw their wealth growing, on an average, by ₹2,200 crore a day in 2018, while 13.6 crore Indians — who make up the poorest 10 per cent of the country — have continued to languish in debt since 2004, a new report has revealed.

This widening economic disparity between the rich and the poor in the country was highlighted in an annual report — ‘Public Good or Private Wealth’ — to be made public by Oxfam, an international charity organisation, on Monday.

According to Amitabh Behar, CEO of Oxfam India, it is morally outrageous that a few wealthy individuals are amassing a growing share of India’s wealth while the poor are struggling to eat their next meal or pay for their child’s medicines.

“If this obscene inequality between the top 1 per cent and the rest of India continues, it will lead to a complete collapse of the social and democratic structure of this country,” he cautioned.

Just as is the global trend, wealth inequality is on the rise in India, the Oxfam report said. The Gini wealth coefficient in India has gone up from 81.2 per cent in 2008 to 85.4 per cent in 2018, which shows inequality has risen (the coefficient is a statistical measure of distribution developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini in 1912, which is often used as a gauge of economic inequality, measuring income distribution or, less commonly, wealth distribution among a population).

Rising inequality threatens the social fabric of the nation. Inequitable growth provides fuel for social unrest and rising crime. Oxfarm releases its annual report every year on the eve of the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland. It claims that its calculations are based on the most up to date, comprehensive data sources that are available.

Figures on the share of wealth owned by the poorest half of humanity come from the Credit Suisse Wealth Data book and relate to the June 2017–June 2018 period.

Figures on the very richest in society are based on more detailed data from the Annual Forbes ‘Billionaires List’ and relate to the March 2017–March 2018 period.

Rising billionaires

The report stated that the number of billionaires has gone up to 119, with 18 more joining the list. There are 15 billionaires from the consumer goods industry and 15 billionaires from the pharmaceuticals industry — a rarity among developing countries. However, in terms of gender equality among Indian billionaires, the picture is dismal. “There are only nine women billionaires in the list, constituting just 7.5 per cent of the Indian billionaires. Thus ‘Billionaires Boys Club’ is not a myth,” the report said.

It also said that the billionaires’ wealth crossed the $400 billion (₹28,00,000 crore) mark for the first time. It rose from $325.5 billion (₹22,72,500 crore) in 2017 to $440.1 billion (₹30,80,700 crore) in 2018. This is the single largest annual increase since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.

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