Former Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian has expressed surprise how the GDP has been rising. He said India has missed its date for the decadal census for the first time in 140 years in 2021, citing Covid-19. He maintained India also has issues with the UN World Health Organisation (WHO) data on underestimation of the Covid death toll by ten times. India is the only country in the world which contests WHO’s Covid numbers.

Paris based World Inequality Lab, with path breaking work into income and wealth inequality in recent years, has a paper out on the state of inequality in India titled Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023. The Rise of the Billionaire Raj has found analyzing data between 1922 and 2022 (a century of data on incomes and wealth) that “By 2022-23, top one percent income and wealth shares (22.6 percent) are at their highest historical levels and India’s top one percent income share is among the very highest in the world, higher than even South Africa, Brazil and US”. It says, “the billionaire raj” (a term used to define the post 2010s, at odds with lives of millions, popularized by James Crabtree’s book, of the same name is now more unequal than the British colonial raj.” It makes two other observations, one on income tax being regressive, if seen from the prism of net wealth in society. Also, the poor economic data, which has seen a decline recently. It finds while inequality has been rising sharply in India since the 198s, between 2014-15 and 2022-23, the rise of top-end inequality has been particularly pronounced in terms of wealth concentration.

Some other key findings revealed that inequality declined post-independence till the early 1980s, after which it began rising and sky rocketed the early 2000s. Trends of top income and wealth shares track each other over the entire period of the study. It said by 2022-23, top one percent income and wealth shares (22.6 percent and 40.1 percent) are at their highest historical levels and India’s top one percent is among the very highest in the world, higher than even South Africa, Brazil and USA. The study further reveals , in line with earlier work the paper finds suggestive evidence that the Indian income tax system might be regressive when viewed from the lenses of net wealth. The study suggests a restructuring of the tax code to account for both income and wealth and broad based public investments in health, education and nutrition are needed to enable the average Indian, and not just the elites, to benefit meaningfully from the ongoing wave of globalization. Besides serving as a tool to fight inequality, a “super tax” of two percent on the net wealth of the 167 wealthiest families in 2022-2023 would yield 0.5 percent of national income in revenues and create valuable fiscal space to facilitate such investments.

The study emphasizes that the quality of economic data in India is poor and has seen a decline recently. It is therefore likely that these new estimates represent a lower bound to actual inequality levels. All the facts relating to national income accounts, wealth aggregates, tax tabulations, rich lists, and surveys on income, consumption, and wealth in a consistent framework to present long run homogenous series of income and wealth inequality in India have been pulled together. Union government in the past few years has been adept at refuting any global assessment pointing to economic facts such as hunger and malnutrition, while not having made data available at regular intervals as was the case earlier. India’s GDP data itself is highly contested.

In view of the foregoing, United Nations International Organisation (ILO) in its latest report on employment in India has recorded 83 percent youth with secondary and higher education are unemployed as at the end of 2023. ILO is devoted to promoting social justice and internationally recognized human and labour rights. Contrary to this, the NITI Ayog’s claims that RSS Pariwar union government has lifted 25 crore (250 million) people above poverty since 2014 demolish the facts that the data of the NITI Ayog is fudged in line with the government notorious for tinkering with data. This data is high on rhetoric and low on ground as there is no nexus with the ground reality!