A recent report by the NGO Oxfam has brought to the fore the wide gap which exists between India's rich and poor. The country's most affluent 1 per cent now own more than four times the wealth that 953 million people have. The latter represents 70 per cent of India's total 1.37 billion population.
The total wealth of all Indian billionaires has also been found to be more than the country's annual budget of $344 billion in 2018-19.
These are the findings of the rights group Oxfam, as mentioned in a study named 'Time to Care', released ahead of the 50th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland on Monday.
The picture was no different when juxtaposed onto the global scale, according to the report.
The world's 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people, making up 60 per cent of the total human race, the report revealed.
Oxfam India CEO Amitabh Behar, visiting Davos to represent the Oxfam confederation, said: "Our broken economies are lining the pockets of billionaires and big business at the expense of ordinary men and women."
The study titled "Time to Care' also observes it would take a female domestic worker 22,277 years to earn what a top CEO of a Tech company makes in one year. "With earnings pegged at $1.5 per second, the CEO would make more in 10 minutes than what the domestic worker would make in one year."