Editor,
Amir Jahan, a mother of three daughters, had been starving for four days in a rented room in Moradabad town in Uttar Pradesh. She had an Aadhaar card and had applied for a ration card under the BPL category, but it was rejected. Her husband used to pull a rickshaw till he got TB. After some treatment, he moved to Pune and had not been in touch with her for two months.
Amir Jahan’s neighbour, Shabana Begum, also poor, but after hearing the girls sobbing, she gave Janan six chapattis. But when her daughters were also starving, how could a mother eat even a single chapatti? So, Amir Jahan distributed all six chapattis to her three daughters and went to bed on an empty stomach.
Her eldest daughter, Rehana, said, “Mother gave us all of it despite our protest, saying she was stronger than us and would survive. She hadn’t eaten for four days.”
The next day, Amir Jahan passed away. Shabana Begum took her to a hospital, where doctors told her that she had nothing in her stomach. It was Republic Day in 2018.
The next day, the IPL auctions began. On that day, English all-rounder Ben Stokes had entered into a one-year playing contract with the Rajasthan Royals for Rs 12.5 crore. Kings XI Punjab paid 11 crore to Lokesh Rahul and 7.6 crore to Ravichandran Ashwin. The Kolkata Knight Riders gave 9.6 crore to Chris Lynn, 9.4 crore to Mitchell Stark and 7.4 crore to Dinesh Karthik. Sunrisers Hyderabad spent Rs 11 crore for Manish Pandey and nine crore for Rashid Khan. There were many other such deals involving enormous amounts.
These two back-to-back incidents showcased the ugliness of inequality. At one end of this inequality-ridden economy, Amir Jahan had to die for not being able to deprive her children of food, and at the other end, it was a generous fun game of crores of rupees.
Apart from the ugly inhuman face of inequality, the durability of inequality-ridden economic structure is always at stake. It is like a house of cards. If we keep on giving priority only on our lopsided GDP growth and beating drums of trillion dollar economy – completely ignoring growth in human development – then it would be like a game of building a shaky highrise with cards.
India has slid into a horrific 111th rank among 125 countries in the 2023 Global Hunger Index. But amid hunger and poverty, India has produced more billionaires than developed countries like Germany (126), Russia (105), Italy (64), Canada (63), UK (52), Australia (47) and Japan (40). As per the data from the World of Statistics, India is home to 169 billionaires – the third highest in the world after the USA (735) and China (495).
According to the World Inequality Report 2022, India is the most unequal nation in the world. India’s top 1 percent of the population hold more than one-fifth of the total national income and the bottom half just 13 percent. The report stated that the economic reforms adopted by India have mostly benefited the top 1 percent. It has been observed that the deregulation and liberalisation policies implemented in India since the mid-1980s have led to one of the most extreme increases in income and wealth inequality in the world. There is also high gender inequality in India as the female labour income share is equal to 18 percent, which is one of the lowest in the world.
The report suggested that a modest progressive wealth tax should be levied on multimillionaires. It can generate significant revenues for government because of the high concentration of wealth. On the contrary, huge amounts of bank loans to rich businessmen are frequently written off without much ado, whereas social security is ridiculed as ‘freebies’ and ‘rewdis’.
This glaring inequality must immediately be bridged. Our banking sector needs to sanction more micro-loans for farming, cottage and small enterprises that can mainly generate employment and less NPA-generating macro-credits. Moreover, the poor who are reeling from high inequality, rising inflation, nagging unemployment and negative growth in real wages, as per the Economic Survey of 2022-’23, must not be further burdened with GST. GST should exist only on luxury and non-essential goods. But essential goods must have zero GST.
The policymakers should take corrective measures. Otherwise inequality-ridden economic edifice could any time be fall like a house of cards. Inequality and poverty not only cause stagnation in the market but also lower the quality of workforce in skill and health.
Sujit De,
Kolkata