India’s growth story meets a stark wealth divide: billionaires gain as top 1% owns 40% of wealth

India’s rapid economic expansion is accompanied by an increasingly concentrated distribution of wealth, raising fresh questions over how fheadline GDP figures reflect the economic reality of ordinary Indians.

A two yearold social-media post by former bureaucrat Anil Swarup, founder chairman of Nexus of Good, has resurrected a debate over the gap between India’s aggregate economic size and the wealth held by its richest citizens. Swarup argues that looking only at GDP per capita can obscure the extent to which wealth is concentrated among a small section of the population.

According to him, "India's GDP in 2024 is approximately $4 trillion (₹330 lakh-crore), with a population of 1.4 billion, resulting in a per capita income of about $2,800. However, this figure is misleading when we consider wealth distribution. Ambani and Adani alone have a combined wealth of around $200 billion. The top 10 wealthiest individuals account for about $420 billion, the top 200 individuals for about $1 trillion, the top 1% of the population for $1.6 trillion, and the top 5% for $2.5 trillion."

He adds, "To put this in perspective, excluding Ambani and Adani India's per capita wealth drops to $2,700. Excluding the top 10 individuals, it falls to $2,500; excluding the top 200, it drops to $2,150; excluding the top 1%, it plummets to $1,730; and excluding the top 5%, it sinks to about $1,130. This last figure is below the per capita income of most Sub-Saharan African countries."

Swarup is a retired 1981-batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer and former Secretary to the Government of India. He founded the Nexus of Good Foundation to "identify, understand, promote, and scale positive, replicable social initiatives across sectors like education, healthcare, and the environment."

Taking rounds among those who take keen interest in policy issues, especially former and present bureaucratic elite, there appears to much truth in what this former bureaucrat argues. Indeed, India’s economy has expanded to roughly $4 trillion in current-dollar terms, while GDP per capita remains only a few thousand dollars. The World Bank currently puts India’s GDP per capita at about $2,700, underscoring the enormous difference between the size of the national economy and average output per person.

But wealth inequality is even more striking.

According to the World Inequality Lab’s India study, the richest 1% of Indians owned 40.1% of the country’s total wealth in 2022-23, the highest level recorded in the researchers’ historical series. The same group received 22.6% of national income. The researchers described the resulting system as the rise of a “Billionaire Raj.”

The concentration becomes more pronounced at the very top. World Inequality Lab estimates show that the top 10% own about 65% of India’s wealth, while the bottom 50% own just 6.4%. The top 0.1% alone control around 30% of wealth, while the top 0.01% control about 22%.

The rise of billionaire wealth has also been dramatic. Hurun’s 2024 global rich list counted 271 Indian billionaires, up sharply from the previous year. Mukesh Ambani remained among the world’s richest people, while Gautam Adani’s wealth surged, putting him among the world's leading billionaires.

These numbers help explain why GDP per capita should not be interpreted as the wealth actually possessed by the average Indian household. GDP measures the value of goods and services produced in a year; wealth measures accumulated assets such as businesses, shares, property and financial holdings. A country can therefore record rapid GDP growth while simultaneously experiencing a highly unequal distribution of wealth.

This distinction is important in assessing Swarup’s calculation that removing the wealth of billionaires or the richest sections of society would dramatically reduce India's “per capita” figure. The calculation is useful as an illustration of concentration, but it is not a conventional measure of per-capita income or wealth, because it mixes annual GDP with accumulated private wealth.

The broader conclusion, however, is consistent with major inequality research.

The World Inequality Lab found that wealth inequality in India began rising sharply after the 1980s and accelerated particularly rapidly after the early 2000s. Between 2014-15 and 2022-23, wealth concentration at the top increased substantially. The researchers also cautioned that India's economic data have significant limitations and said their estimates could represent a lower bound of actual inequality.

The debate has already moved beyond measurement to policy. The World Inequality Lab has proposed a combination of wealth and inheritance taxation on the ultra-rich. Its researchers estimated that a 2% annual tax on the net wealth of the 167 wealthiest families could raise revenue equivalent to around 0.5% of national income, potentially creating additional fiscal space for spending on health, education and nutrition.

India's economic transformation, therefore, presents two realities at once: a country that has emerged as one of the world's largest and fastest-growing major economies, and a society in which a relatively small segment controls a remarkably large share of accumulated wealth.

The challenge for policymakers is no longer simply how to make India's economy larger, but how to ensure that the gains from that growth translate into higher incomes, greater asset ownership and improved living standards for a much broader share of the population.