A survey has revealed a deep gap between the rich and the poor. The survey revealed that the top 10 percent of urban households in India own assets worth Rs 1.5 crore, while those living in poverty have only Rs 2,000. This figure shows the deep divide between rich and poor in cities.
India is dominated by rich people, according to a recently released government report, 10 percent of India’s wealthy people have more than half of the country’s financial assets and physical facilities. The All India Debt and Investment Survey, 2019 shows that 10 percent of India’s rich own 55.7 percent of the total wealth in urban areas and 50.8 percent in rural areas.
However, the situation in rural areas is slightly better. Here the top 10 percent of households have assets worth Rs 81.17 lakh, while the families at the bottom have assets worth Rs 41,000. These figures have come in the All India Debt and Investment Survey 2019 which was conducted by the Department of the Statistics Ministry of Statistics NSO.
According to the Times of India, wealth is ascertained by putting the value of everything owned by households, including physical assets such as land, buildings, livestock, and vehicles as well as financial assets such as shares in companies, deposits in banks, and post office, etc.
The survey revealed that the condition of the poor in rural areas is much better than the poor in urban areas. Poor families in urban areas own property worth only Rs 2000. The survey conducted from January to December 2019 estimated that the total physical and financial assets of people living in rural areas was Rs 274.6 lakh crore, of which 10 percent of the country’s capitalists owned Rs 139.6 lakh crore. In rural areas, out of the total Rs 238.1 lakh crore, the top 10% have assets worth Rs 132.5 lakh crore. The bottom 50% owned 10.2% of assets in rural areas and even less than 6.2% in urban areas.
The department had conducted this survey in January-December 2019 under the National Sample Survey. The main objective of this survey was to find out how many assets and liabilities are with the households as of June 2018. They did this survey on a large scale. This included 69,455 families from 5940 villages. Whereas, they covered 47006 families of 3995 blocks of urban areas in the survey.
However, in some states of the country, its figures are even different. In Delhi, the top 10% owned 80.8% of the assets, and the bottom 50% had just 2.1%. This may be because of the high valuation of what they left of rural land in the nation’s periphery’s capital.
After the country’s capital Delhi, the wealth inequality in rural areas was highest in Punjab, where the 10 percent of the rich owned more than 65% and the bottom 50% owned more than 5%.
Among all the states and union territories, Jammu and Kashmir had the lowest skew of wealth in rural areas, where the top 10 percent of the rich owned 32 percent and the bottom 18 percent.
