India's richest 1% hold more than four times the wealth held by 953 million people who make up for the bottom 70% of the country's population, while the total wealth of all Indian billionaires is more than the full-year budget, stated a new study by Oxfam International.
Releasing the study 'Time to Care' ahead of the 50th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), rights group Oxfam also said the world's 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 per cent of the planet's population.
The report flagged that global inequality is shockingly entrenched and vast and the number of billionaires has doubled in the last decade, despite their combined wealth having declined in the last year.
“The gap between rich and poor can’t be resolved without deliberate inequality-busting policies, and too few governments are committed to these.”Amitabh Behar, Oxfam India CEO
The Oxfam report further said "sexist" economies are fuelling the inequality crisis by enabling a wealthy elite to accumulate vast fortunes at the expense of ordinary people and particularly poor women and girls.
In India, the combined total wealth of 63 Indian billionaires is higher than the total Union Budget of India for the fiscal year 2018-19 which was at Rs 24,42,200 crore.
As per the report, it would take a female domestic worker 22,277 years to earn what a top CEO of a technology company makes in one year.
With earnings pegged at Rs 106 per second, a tech CEO would make more in 10 minutes than what a domestic worker would make in one year.
It further said women and girls put in 3.26 billion hours of unpaid care work each and every day -- a contribution to the Indian economy of at least Rs 19 lakh crore a year, which is 20 times the entire education budget of India in 2019 (Rs 93,000 crore).
The report also states that women and girls are among those who benefit the least from today's economic system.
“They spend billions of hours cooking, cleaning and caring for children and the elderly. Unpaid care work is the ‘hidden engine’ that keeps the wheels of our economies, businesses and societies moving. It is driven by women who often have little time to get an education, earn a decent living or have a say in how our societies are run, and who are therefore trapped at the bottom of the economy.”Amitabh Behar, Oxfam India CEO
As per the global survey, the 22 richest men in the world have more wealth than all the women in Africa.
The report also states that women and girls put in 12.5 billion hours of unpaid care work each and every day – a contribution to the global economy of at least USD 10.8 trillion a year, more than three times the size of the global tech industry.
(With inputs from PTI)
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