Wealth of top-10 richest suffices to fund education for 25 yrs
1% tax on 10 wealthy persons can finance Ayushman Bharat for 7yrs
New Delhi: Indian billionaires saw their combined fortunes more than double during the Covid-19 pandemic, and their count shot up by 39 per cent to 142, while the wealth of the ten richest is enough to fund school and higher education of children in the country for 25 years, a new study showed on Monday.
In its annual inequality survey released on the first day of the World Economic Forum's online Davos Agenda summit, Oxfam India further said that an additional one per cent tax on the richest 10 can provide the country with nearly 17.7 lakh extra oxygen cylinders, while a similar wealth tax on the 98 richest billionaire families would finance Ayushman Bharat, the world's largest health insurance scheme, for more than seven years. The Covid-19 pandemic saw a huge rush for oxygen cylinders and insurance claims during the second wave last year. On wealth inequality, Oxfam report further said that 142 Indian billionaires collectively own wealth of $719 billion (over Rs53 lakh crore), while the richest 98 of them now have the same wealth as the poorest 55.5 crore people in the bottom 40 per cent ($657 billion or nearly Rs 49 lakh crore).
If each of the 10 richest Indian billionaires were to spend $one million daily, it would take them 84 years to exhaust their current wealth, while an annual wealth tax applied to multi-millionaires and billionaires would raise $78.3 billion a year that would be enough to increase government health budget by 271 per cent or eliminate households' out-of-pocket health budget and leave some $30.5 billion. Noting that Covid-19 may have begun as a health crisis but has become an economic one now, Oxfam said the wealthiest 10 per cent have amassed 45 per cent of the national wealth while the share of the bottom 50 per cent of the population is a mere 6 per cent. It further said that the inadequate governmental expenditure on health, education and social security has gone hand-in-hand with a rise in the privatisation of health and education, thus making a full and secure Covid-19 recovery out of reach for the common citizen.
