New Delhi: The combined total wealth of 63 Indian billionaires is higher than the total Union Budget of India for the fiscal year 2018-19 which was at Rs 24,42,200 crore, revealed a new report from Oxfam ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.
The top 1% of Indians hold more than 4 times the amount of wealth held by 953 million people (or the bottom 70% of the population), Oxfam’s report, ‘Time to Care’ said.
It would take a female domestic worker 22,277 years to earn what a top CEO of a Tech company makes in one year. With earnings pegged at Rs 106 per second, the CEO would make more in 10 minutes than what the domestic worker would make in one year, the study said.
Women and girls put in 3.26 billion hours of unpaid care work each and every day—a contribution to the Indian economy of at least Rs 19 lakh crore a year; which is 20 times the entire education budget of India in 2019 (INR 93,000 crores), it said.
Direct public investments in the care economy of 2% of GDP would potentially create 11 million new jobs. This would make up for the 11 million jobs lost in 2018, the report stated.
The world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the planet’s population, the report also showed.