Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj

Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, and Anmol Somanchi, World Bank Economic Review, 2026

Integrating national income accounts, wealth aggregates, tax data, rich lists, and surveys on income, consumption, and wealth in a consistent framework, long-run and short-run trends of income and wealth inequality in India are analyzed. Inequality declined post-independence, began rising in the early 1980s, and has skyrocketed since the early 2000s. Income and wealth inequality trends closely track each other over the entire period, with the rise in wealth con centration at the top being more pronounced in the most recent decade. By 2022–23, the top 1 percent income and wealth shares (23.3 percent and 40.1 percent) were at their highest historical levels with India’s top 1 percent income share among the highest in the world. While the best available data sources at hand are used, it is emphasized that the poor and declining quality of economic data in India poses significant challenges for inequality measurement.

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