Macroeconomic indicators pegged India’s economic growth over the last couple of years as having beaten general expectations (see here, here, here, here and here). In January 2024, the National Statistical Office declared that India’s real GDP growth for 2023-24 would be 7.3%, more than any of the world’s major economies, higher than the International Monetary Fund’s December 2023 projection of 6.3%.

With China still struggling post-pandemic and the Euro zone only narrowly escaping economic contraction in the last three months of 2023, the exultations on India’s GDP numbers—which rose significantly on account of a post-Covid base effect and then continued to be pegged at 6%-7%—have persisted.

Now, about a month before India’s general election in April-May 2024, a new paper by economists of the World Inequality Lab raises critical questions about the growth numbers—how is this growth distributed across the population, who has gained and who has lost, whether their gains and losses were rooted in particular policy trajectories pursued by the government.

Stark inequalities in India are visible everyday—a £120 million Ambani wedding in Jamnagar co-exists with data on Indian children who had not consumed any food over a 24-hour period, termed ‘zero-food’ children. The findings of the World Inequality Lab paper, titled Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj, puts anecdotal evidence into perspective.

The paper is co-authored by Nitin Kumar Bharti of New York University-Abu Dhabi; Lucas Chancel of Sciences Po Paris and Harvard Kennedy School; Thomas Piketty of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) and Paris School of Economics; and Anmol Somanchi of the Paris School of Economics. The authors combined national income accounts, tax data, billionaire rankings and surveys on income, consumption and wealth to create data series back till 1922.



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