PLUTOCRACY – Government by the wealthy; a controlling class of the wealthy.

-By Jai Prakash Bharat

The Oxford Dictionary defines the word “Plutocracy” as a society governed by the wealthy. Ploutos was Greek for “wealth”, and Plouton, or Pluto, was one of the names used for the Greek god of the underworld, where all the earth’s mineral wealth was stored. So a plutocracy governs or wields power through its money.

The top 10% grew at a much faster rate than the average, While income growth of the balance 90% fell below average. While the authors avoid offering any conclusions about the impact of economic reforms on inequality or poverty in India, their findings point to an uncomfortable truth: Post the 1980s, when the process of economic reforms began, the Top 1% in India have seen their incomes and wealth grow at a much faster rate than the balance 99%.

Increasing wealth concentration among the rich is corroborated by Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report 2016:

India’s top 1%, which owned 36.8% of the country’s wealth in 2000, now owns close to 58% of the wealth (the global average is 50%).

An Oxfam 2017 report showed that 57 Indian billionaires own as much as the bottom 70% of the population.
Reserve Bank of India has selected CPI as its chosen benchmark for inflation targeting

Public-private partnerships (PPPs how this financing mode was used to reward private sector partners with state resources (including valuable real estate) with the government (or government-owned institutions) shouldering the bulk of project risk.

State Bank of India (SBI), decided to step outside its sandbox and experiment with new revenue sources: it decided to penalize customers who failed to maintain the monthly average balance in their savings bank account.
It is instructive to note the role of politicians in plutocracy.

The bulk of assets with the ultra-rich who make up top 0.3% of our population.

We learn that India has 200 families with a net worth of a billion dollars.

• Another 3,000 families have assets worth Rs 1,000 crore;
• 13,000 families have wealth between Rs 200-1,000 crore;
• 23,000 households fall in the Rs 100-200 crore bracket;
• 2.94 lakh families have wealth between Rs 10-100 crore
• and another 4.12 lakh households own assets worth at a million dollars, or Rs 7-10 crore.

Add all of them and you get about 8.5 lakh families with assets ranging from Rs 7 crore to over a billion dollars.
That accounts for 0.3 per cent of all households in India.
The report also identifies a category called the ‘new middle class’. These are families which earn at least Rs 50 lakh per year and save an average of Rs 20 lakh out of that.
The wealth share of the top 1% was around 10–16% till 1990s but has now reached 42.5% (in 2020).
The wealth of the bottom 50% fell from 12.3% in 1961 to 2.8% in 2020.
Corporate donations to national political parties in India increased from INR 621 million in 2004–5 to INR 8,813 million in 2019–20.
According to the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), more than 90% of donations to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress (INC) are from corporates.
Corporate funding for INC has reduced considerably over a period as they were not in power from 2014; simultaneously, corporate funding for the BJP has increased over 375% between 2004–18.
Between March 2018 and July 2021, around INR 73,806.38 Million worth Electoral Bonds were sold according to the ADR report.
The impact of corporate funding on policy-making needs to be explored further. The government’s revenue forgone in the form of incentives and tax exemptions (primarily to corporates), which stood at INR 23,180 million in 2004–5 has increased to INR 1,081,130 million in 2018–19. From 9 billionaires in 2000, India now has 119 billionaires and even during the pandemic, the wealth of Indian corporate billionaires increased by 35%, when millions were losing their livelihood for basic survival.
Based on the neoliberal dictates of the World Bank, India introduced targeted Public Distribution System (PDS) in 1997 to curtail food subsidy, which has not been effective in ensuring food security in India. The 2020 Global Hunger Index ranked India 94th ( now 2021 it 101)out of 107 countries; neighbours Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Pakistan have all performed better than India.
Total public expenditure on health in India is currently around 1.23%, which is insufficient to meet the needs of the rising population. According to the Ministry of Health, Government of India, accessing quality health care is a difficult task for many people and every year 63 million people fall into the poverty trap due to expensive healthcare expenditures in India.
Also Read – Veil of ignorance According to a report by the Swiss bank UBS, mentioned in The Guardian on October 7, the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by 27.5 per cent between April and July this year, the period when the pandemic was at its peak.
Their wealth by the end of July had touched a record high of USD 10.2 trillion or £7.8 trillion. Recently, the Asian Development Bank published a study (“India 2039 – an affluent society in one generation”) highlighting that that India has 50 billionaires who together control wealth equivalent to 20% of gross domestic product and 80% of stock market capitalisation.