An Indian earning a monthly wage of Rs 25,000 is among the top 10 per cent of earners in the country. This is what the recently released State of Inequality in India report by the Institute for Competitiveness found, using available government data.
As if dissuaded from diving deeper into inequality in India, the report cautioned: “If an amount like this comes in the top 10 percentile, then the bottom-most condition cannot be imagined.”
The Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister commissioned this study. This demonstrates the wide chasm between the top and bottom earners. And this is getting wider.
Incomes of the top 1 per cent earners grew 15 per cent during 2017-18 to 2019-2020 while that of the bottom 10 per cent declined 1 per cent — a “failure of the trickle-down approach to economic growth”, the report concluded.
— source downtoearth.org.in | Richard Mahapatra | 23 May 2022