The inequality debate should also allow alternative viewpoints for the sake of honest discussions, he said, indicating that fanatically following a particular approach and castigating those with a different viewpoint doesn’t help address the real issues.
The CEA was speaking on the topic of Inequality, Economic Growth and Inclusion at a seminar, organised by policy research institute RIS and the Delhi School of Economics in the national capital.
“Even before the discussion begins, any person advocating an alternative point of view is straightforwardly labelled as somebody who argues for the status quo or for the wealthy or the rich, rather than wanting to have an honest discussion from a public policy perspective of what matters and what can be done,” Nageswaran said.
Citing a private think-tank’s survey, he said the headline that grabbed eyeballs suggested that the number of the rich in India jumped by 500% while that of the poor decreased by only 58%.
But granular data presented in the survey showed the number of the poor in the country came down to 67 million over a seven-year period from 115 million in 2015-16. The lower middle class shrank and the number of middle class people rose to 648 million from 579 million. Similarly, the number of upper middle class people jumped to 282 million from 135 million and that of the the rich to 101 million from 24 million between 2015-16 and 2022-23.”So, there has been (upward) mobility across the income classes, that’s what matters, which the headline very conveniently obscures, even though the statistics presented are there for us to interpret,” he said.The inequality debate heated up in India after French economist Thomas Piketty, along with a few others, suggested in a book that inequality in the country today is far worse than during the inter-war British colonial rule. Piketty made a presentation at the panel discussion.
Speaking at the event, Shamika Ravi, a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, refuted the misleading claims on inequality in India. She also advised against comparing India’s performance on inequality with China’s, highlighting that we are a democracy where policy prescriptions will thankfully vary from that of a non-democracy.