Open Forum
New Delhi, 26 January 2022
Dangerous Inequality
GOVT MUST
REDIRECT WEALTH
By
Dhurjati Mukherjee
“A new billionaire
has been created every 26 hours since the pandemic began. The world’s 10
richest men have doubled their fortunes, while over 160 million people are
projected to have been pushed into poverty… ” These‘issues’, says an Oxfam
report are “all part of the same, deeper malaise. It is that inequality is
tearing our societies apart. It is that violence is rigged into our economic
systems. It is that inequality kills. The coronavirus pandemic has been
actively made deadlier, more prolonged, and more damaging to livelihoods
because of inequality.”
The trends are
alarming indeed and the report entitled “Inequality Kills”, has triggered a
sharpened debateon inequality, which needs urgent correction globally. Amassing
of wealth by billionaires, even during the last two years of the pandemic when,
it is generally believed, that economic activity suffered to a great extent, is
distasteful and shocking. Worse, the Indian billionaires Club adds another
dimension to it.
In its India
Supplement 2021, the report highlighted that 4.6 crore Indians are estimated to
have fallen into extreme poverty in 2020, accounting for nearly half of the
global ‘new poor’, as per the United Nations. And while the income of 84
percent households had fallen in 2021, the number of Indian billionaires grew
from 102 to 145 during the pandemic. The collective wealth of India’s richest
people hit a record high of Rs 57.3 crore ($775 billion) in 2021. The wealth of
the billionaires during the pandemic – from March 2020 to November 2021 –
increased from Rs 23.1 lakh crore ($313 billion) to Rs 53.2 lakh crore ($719
billion).
The report showed
that about 1/5thof the increase in the rise of the richest 100
families was accounted for from the increase of the wealth of a single
individual and business house – the Adanis: “Gautam Adani, ranked 24th
globally and second in India, witnessed his net worth multiply. . . from $8.9
billion in 2020 to $50.5 billion in 2021. . . At the same time, Mukesh Ambani’s
net worth doubled in 2021 to $85.5 billion from $36.8 billion in 2020.”
Additionally, it pointed
to three policy decisions of the Modi government as pro-rich, maintaining that
“the abolition of wealth tax in 2016, steep cuts in corporate taxes and an
increase in indirect taxation have removed the rich from being the primary
source of tax revenue”.
And, if this be the
case, then the so-called policy decisions or reforms seem faulty as these are obviously
not intended to curb disparity in incomes. Instead, these merely attract
foreign capital and increase GDP. None will help in ensuring a better livelihood
for the bottom segments of the population. It will neither boost up consumption
that would create demand and stabilise prices nor create jobs. It can very well
be argued that the pro-capitalist, pro-rich path of growth will not help in
grass-root economic development.
One may refer to the
World Inequality Report, 2022 which showed that the top 1 percent holds 33
percent of the country’s wealth and the top 10 percent holds 64.6 percent of
the wealth. To get out of the poverty trap, there is a need to raise incomes,
which require job creation. On the one hand, the growth being witnessed is
jobless and, on the other, there is a lack of structural change with the share
of the workforce in agriculture actually increasing.
The pandemic put spotlight
on internal migration. In India, the highest migration takes place among the
20-24 age groups (NSS 64th round). As many as 8 of 10 households
reported internal migration, increasing unemployment, lack of employment
policy, regional inequalities and rural-urban divide along with absence of
migration policy for actively promoting skills and migration. The pitiable
condition of migrants witnessed during the past two years simply confirms the
travails of inequality.
Recently, the Supreme
Court agreed to examine a complaint – moved by civil liberties and RTI
activists, Harsh Mander, Anjali Bhardwaj etc. -- that lakhs of migrant workers
were facing grave food and livelihood crisis amid the pandemic due to the
government’s failure to provide relief despite the court’s directive seven
months back.
The petitioners
referred to the findings of the CMIE that the proportion of households where
more than one person is employed has fallen from nearly 35 percent in 2016 to
about 24 percent in 2021. Households where only one person is employed has
risen from 59 percent in 2016 to 68 percent in the first 11 months of 2021.
Thus, it is amply manifest that the focus of the government’s strategy is to
ignore the concerns and demands of the poor sections. The apex court chastised
the States for rejecting monetary claims of thousands of families that had lost
members to Covid and ordered the governments to directly reach out to orphaned
children with financial succour.
The question that arises
is whether the government is numbed at all over the inequality graph? Is it at
all interested in changing its strategy of development to ensure that those in
need are given proper protection and support? The policy focus and the yearning
to help big business in all possible ways, even if they violate rules and
regulations of the country has only added to the wealth of the millionaires of
the country, while the poor continue to suffer.
Why is it that a
major section of economists are against imposing a tax on the super-rich? Is it
because they continue to fund the party in power or are they really a partner
in grass-root development? It is time the government reorients its strategy and
start providing help and support to the deprived and seek to bridge the
inequality gap. A possible step, to begin with, could be say increase the
budget of MGNREGA by at least 15 to 20 percent and devise an urban employment
programme for the poor in the next fiscal; see how much of the promised Rs 1000
crore to support migrant labourers from PM Cares Fund, as pledged has been
spent, etc.
While there is a need
to evolve a comprehensive rural development strategy and a social
infrastructure plan, what will matter most is a political will,wherein “Governments
must rewrite the rules within their economies that create such colossal
divides, and act to pre-distribute income, change laws, and redistribute power
in decision-making and power in the economy.” For as the report warns: “Higher
inequality begets more crime, less happiness, less trust, and more violence.It
makes the aim of banishing poverty from the world impossible.”---INFA
(Copyright, India
News & Feature Alliance)
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