99% sheep, 1% lions

Unequal India

The nagging fact of the world's richest 1% owning more than twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people makes us queasy, for growing income and wealth inequality counts as a great social threat today and is a blot on policymaking. India lies somewhere between the more equal East Asia and highly unequal Latin America in terms of economic inequality. So, what’s the fuss?

The knowledge that Indian billionaires increased their wealth by 35% during the lockdown to Rs 3 trillion, ranking India’s rich after those of the US, China, Germany, Russia and France, could make one ask: Did they make hay while the sun shone? But why do revelations that India’s rich got richer and the poor poorer during the pandemic continue to occasion surprise or look epiphanic? The answer possibly is that despite our instinct of becoming economically better off, we do not react kindly to tales of vast inequalities existing between us in a democracy.

“In fact, the increase in wealth of the top 11 billionaires of India during the pandemic could sustain the NREGS scheme for 10 years or the health ministry for 10 years," Oxfam’s ‘Inequality Virus Report’ analysed, further calculating that the money was enough to credit every one of the 138 million poorest Indians with Rs 94,045 each. We had similar comparisons when we heard about economic offenders such as Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi, Vijay Mallya, Sanjay Bhandari and Lalit Modi who had fled the country, defrauding the nation of billions of rupees, with graphics illustrating how the money could be spent on immunising every child, shoring up our healthcare, or addressing hunger (India ranked 94 among 107 countries in the Global Hunger Index 2020).

In the methodology explainer of the Oxfam report, we learn that “between 18 March and 31 October 2020, Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man and chairman, managing director and largest shareholder of Reliance Industries Ltd – which specializes in petrol, retail and telecommunications – more than doubled his wealth, which rose from $36.8bn to $78.3bn in eight months. This meant that he jumped from being the 21st richest person in the world to the sixth richest”. “While we acknowledge that the increase was not linear, considering the 227 days between 18 March and 31 October, the $41.5bn increase in his wealth means an average increase of $182.8m per day,” it added editorially.

The corresponding loss of jobs and income of the vast army of India’s migrant workers, however, is yet to be accounted for. The pandemic has already divided India into digital haves and have-nots. Sometimes, the discretion as to when we need to prize inequality and chutzpah to promote entrepreneurialism over inequality to ensure the monopoly of the rich gets lost to the diktats of remaining in the levers of power. Well, it’s not class angst.

We already know of many economic inequalities to prevail across the states of India, between rural and urban areas, between organised and unorganised sectors, and between capital income and wage income. For instance, one might argue that inequalities do exist even among the farming communities in India, that the protesting farmers of Punjab and Haryana are way richer than their counterparts elsewhere (mostly marginal and small farmers making two ends meet) and thus cannot be taken to be true representatives of the typical Indian farmer. The number of landless agricultural workers in India increased from 106.7 million, as per Census 2001, to 144.3 million in 2011, registering a rise of 35% in a decade.

But having said that, what adds legitimacy to the worry of the agitating farmers is their fear that the new farm laws have been drafted to facilitate ease of doing business for large corporations, and their larger fear of wholesale corporatisation (and crony capitalism) of Indian farming, for the prognostications of the ruling dispensation have given enough reason for such suspicion to gain ground. That the government of the day keeps on trying to make corporates richer at the expense of others, be it in agriculture, aviation, natural resources or telecom sector, in ruthless disdain of the popular consensus, and bulldozes those standing in opposition, is the crux of the problem.

If attempts have been made to correct the distortions of social disparities, they are too few and far between. Oxfam’s report further notes that “India has the world’s fourth-lowest health budget in terms of its share of government expenditure, and people pay for more than 70% of health expenses themselves, yet only half the population has access to even the most basic healthcare services.”

That historically oppressed communities have also often been ignored in health-promoting responses, that (even as late as May 2020) 90% of Dalits had no health or life insurance – and 64% had received no instruction or training regarding their safety -- are also among a clutch of indictments made against India in the report. A few budgetary corrections, or bump-up in outlays apart (Rs 71,268.77 crore allocated to the Union Health and Family Welfare Ministry, an increase of about 10% from the previous year) is nowhere close to what the National Health Policy of India envisaged in 2017, that India spend at least 2.5% of its GDP on the health sector by 2025. India hovers between 1% and a little more of GDP on health – 1.8% in 2020-21 – that places it in the league of top 10 nations with the highest out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure.

According to Oxfam’s report, in India, inequality, which fell between Independence and the 1990s, has recently shot back to levels last seen in colonial times. One of the abiding lessons of the pandemic is that we cannot emulate the unsustainable growth model of the West, nor long for "development" with all its inegalitarian trappings. Post-pandemic, the prescription to bring down inequality is time-tested – the provisioning of public goods such as education and public healthcare, and redistributive mechanisms such as effective pension coverage, unemployment assistance, and poverty relief programmes – despite proclivities to shy away from welfarism by ‘atmanirbhar’ shenanigans.