Simply 1% of Indians maintain about 40% of complete wealth within the nation, making revenue inequality in India among the many highest on this planet and “displaying little enchancment”, in keeping with the World Inequality Report 2026, launched on Wednesday.
The report, edited by economists Lucas Chancel, Ricardo Gómez-Carrera, Rowaida Moshrif, and Thomas Piketty, additionally mentioned the richest 10% maintain round 65% of complete wealth.
The highest 10% of earners seize 58% of nationwide revenue, whereas the underside 50% obtain solely 15%.
Deep Structural Divides in India
“Common annual revenue per capita is round $6984 (6,200 euros — buying energy parity or PPP), and common wealth stands at about $32,592 (28,000 euros — PPP). Feminine labour participation stays very low at 15.7%, displaying no enchancment over the previous decade. General, inequality in India stays deeply entrenched throughout revenue, wealth, and gender dimensions, highlighting persistent structural divides throughout the financial system,” the report, prefaced by economists Jayati Ghosh and Joseph Stiglitz, mentioned.
Piketty, co-director of the World Inequality Lab, mentioned, “The report comes at a difficult political time, however it’s extra important than ever. Solely by persevering with the historic motion in the direction of equality will we be capable of deal with the social and local weather challenges of the approaching a long time.”
Staggering International Focus
The world appears to be united in inequality. A tiny slice of the world elite owns 3 times extra wealth than the underside half of the world’s inhabitants mixed.
A little bit beneath 60,000 multimillionaires, the highest 0.001% on the planet, have a mean of virtually €1 billion ($1.2 billion)… Their share has grown steadily from virtually 4% in 1995 to over 6% as we speak, and comes towards the backdrop of the explosion of world inequalities and the weakening of multilateralism, the report mentioned.
In the meantime, an individual within the backside 50% of the inhabitants solely owns about €6,500 ($7,550).
The report seemed on the World Inequality Database, an open-access useful resource for world revenue and wealth inequality, and new analysis to grasp inequality throughout totally different areas together with revenue, gender and politics.
The researchers noticed that despite the fact that wealth has reached “historic heights,” it stays “very inconsistently distributed,” with the richest 10% of individuals having the most important share in private wealth and complete revenue worldwide. They advocate governments use progressive taxes and transfers to scale back inequality.
The examine additionally discovered that ladies solely earn 32% of what males earn per hour when contemplating unpaid home and care labour, relative to 62% when not accounting for these elements.
“Zooming additional in, the focus turns into staggering. The highest 1% alone, roughly the grownup inhabitants of the UK, controls 37% of world wealth. That is greater than 18 instances the wealth of the complete backside half of the world inhabitants, a gaggle as massive because the mixed grownup populations of China, India, the US, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, and Russia,” it mentioned.
The highest one-in-a-million collectively maintain 3% of world wealth, greater than the underside half of the world’s grownup inhabitants.
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