SOME time back, when Thomas Piketty, renowned for his work on inequality, had observed that inequality in India had surpassed the levels prevailing under the British Raj, all hell had broken loose. Now that the World Inequality Report, 2026 is out in the public domain, issues underlining Piketty’s observation are coming out with sharper relief.
The report is moored in serious scholarship and data, as it itself explains: “The World Inequality Report 2026 (WIR 2026) marks the third edition in this flagship series, following the 2018 and 2022 editions. These reports draw from the work of over 200 scholars from all over the world, affiliated with the World Inequality Lab and contributing to the largest database on the historical evolution of global inequality. This collective endeavor represents a significant contribution to global discussions on inequality. The team has helped reshape how policymakers, scholars, and citizens understand the scale and causes of inequality, foregrounding the separatism of the global rich and the urgent need for top-end tax justice. Their findings have informed national and international debates on fiscal reform, wealth taxation, and redistribution in forums from national parliaments to the G20.”
The latest report finds that the present-day golden era of Indian billionaires has produced soaring income inequality in India—now among the highest in the world and starker than in the US, Brazil and South Africa. The gap between India’s rich and poor is now so wide that by some measures, the distribution of income in India was more equitable under British colonial rule than it is now, according to the group of economists who co-authored the study, including Piketty himself.
The current number of billionaires in India is peaking at 271, with 94 new billionaires added in 2023 alone, according to Hurun Research Institute’s 2024 global rich list. That’s more new billionaires than in any country other than the U.S., with a collective wealth that amounts to nearly $1 trillion—or 7 per cent of the world’s total wealth. A handful of Indian tycoons, such as Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani, and Sajjan Jindal, are now mingling in the same fraternity as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the world’s richest people. “The Billionaire Raj headed by India’s modern bourgeoisie is now more unequal than the British Raj headed by the colonialist forces,” the authors write.
The observation is particularly stark when considering that India is supposedly 8 per cent GDP growth economy, according to Barclays Research, with some projecting that India is poised to surpass Japan and Germany to become the world’s third-largest economy by 2027.
But the authors of the World Inequality Lab study reached this conclusion by tracking how much of India’s total income, as well as wealth, is held by the country’s top one per cent. While income refers to the sum of earnings, interest on savings, investments and other sources, wealth (or net worth) is the total value of assets owned by an individual or group. The authors combined national income accounts, wealth aggregates, tax tabulations, rich lists, and surveys on income, consumption and wealth to present the study's findings.
For income, the economists looked at annual tax tabulations released by both the British and Indian governments since 1922. They found that even during the highest recorded period of inequality in India, which occurred during the inter-war colonial period from the 1930s until India’s independence in 1947, the top one per cent held around 20 to 21 per cent of the country’s national income. Today, the top one per cent holds 22.6 per cent of the country’s income.
Similarly, the economists also tracked the dynamics of wealth inequality, beginning in 1961, when the Indian government first began conducting large-scale household surveys on wealth, debt and assets. By combining this research with information from the Forbes Billionaire Index, the authors found that India’s top one per cent had access to a staggering 40.1 per cent of national wealth.
Because the number of Indian billionaires shot up from one in 1991 to 162 in 2022, the total net wealth of these individuals over this period as a share of India’s net national income “boomed from under 1% in 1991 to a whopping 25% in 2022,” the authors said. The report also found that the rise in inequality had been particularly pronounced since the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party first came to power in 2014. Over the last decade, major political and economic reforms have led to “an authoritarian government with centralization of decision-making power, coupled with a growing nexus between big business and government” the report states. This, they say, was likely to “facilitate disproportionate influence” on society and government.
The report added that it is imperative that the government made more public investments in health, education, and nutrition. Moreover, a “super tax” of just two per cent on the net wealth of the 167 wealthiest Indian families in 2022-23 would result in 0.5 per cent of national income in revenues, and “create valuable fiscal space to facilitate such investments,” the authors argued.
However, the Chapters on India in the earlier versions of the World Inequality reports in 2018 and 2022 had underlined similar trends which has come to be amplified in the current report. But this is not a mere research driven theoretical conjecture; it is becoming manifest in the facts presented by the government.
In the current session of Parliament, in replies to questions, the government has informed the Lok Sabha in writing that between 2014-15 and 2023-24 NPAs written off for Large Industries and Services amount to a staggering Rs. 9,26,947 crores (Source: RBI). Similarly, total revenue foregone on account of corporate tax between 2019-20 and 2023-24 is a whopping Rs. 3,67,261 crores Revenue receipt budgets of the corresponding years.
The other side is the ruthless erosion of livelihoods of the working people through initiatives like new labour codes and to do away with right based NREGA work for fixed number of days.
This is unsurprising for we had concluded in our Resolution on Some Ideological Issues adopted at the 20th Congress of CPI(M) at Kozhikode, Kerala April 4-9, 2012: “The current neo-liberal offensive, however, has generated tendencies that make it unsustainable. Two important features of globalisation need to be reiterated to establish this. First, this process has been accompanied by growing economic inequalities both within countries between the rich and poor, and between the advanced and the developing countries. Secondly, globalisation has given rise to the phenomenon of ‘jobless growth’. This is so because the trajectory of profit maximisation invariably replaces human labour by investing more in developing technology rather than developing human resource capabilities”.
Therefore, the way forward is cut out. The struggle for salvaging the livelihood against growing inequality and joblessness must be vigorously pursued. Apart from the working people, this is vital for shoring up aggregate demand, but for which India will descend to the worst form of plutocracy and the consequent apocalypse.
(December 17, 2025)
