Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday termed the World Inequality Report ‘flawed’ and known as its methodology ‘questionable’. The feedback got here in response to the World Inequality Report 2022, revealed by the Paris-based World Inequality Lab, which stated India is a ‘poor and really unequal nation’ and ranked it within the backside half of the record when it comes to each revenue and wealth.
“World Inequality Report terming India as ‘poor and really unequal nation’ is flawed, based mostly on questionable methodology,” Sitharaman stated throughout a Rajya Sabha session.
The report, launched on December 7 final yr, confirmed that whereas the underside half of India’s inhabitants earned ₹53,610 on a mean, the highest 10 per cent earned 20 instances larger, roughly ₹11,66,520.
It additionally confirmed that the richest 10 per cent of the nation owned 76 per cent of the entire wealth, holding 57 per cent of the nationwide revenue in 2021, whereas the share of the underside 50 per cent went all the way down to 13 per cent.
The highest one per cent held greater than one-fifth of the entire nationwide revenue.
The World Inequality Report 2022 additionally estimated gender inequality in international earnings, exhibiting that ladies in India acquired solely 18.3% of the labour revenue in 2020. That is nearly half the share that accrued to girls in different growing economies corresponding to Brazil (38.5%) and China (33.4%), in addition to the worldwide common (34.70%).
These, including to different contributing components, led to India’s positioning within the report as a ‘poor’ and ‘very unequal’ nation, with an prosperous elite inhabitants.