Since hitting the public domain on Monday, the new report released by Oxfam titled ‘Time to Care’ has created waves in India and for common people, it has come like a high voltage electric shock. The richest 1 % of Indians have more than four times the combined wealth held by 95.3 crore fellow citizens and the total wealth of 63 Indian billionaires is higher than the Union Budget of 2018-2019 which was at Rs 24,42,200 crore !!. A few more exclamation marks could have easily accompanied the preceding line, such is the shocking revelation of the report which has painted a disgracefully true picture of the economic inequality quotient of the country. It makes an onerous task of hunting for appropriate adjectives to define the extent of ‘hammering’ the report transmits, but, a few will differ if the phrase ‘nothing short of a calamity’ is settled for. The brouhaha will last for a few days more and die thereafter and again resume only at the next edition of the report which, without fail, will tell such similar tale. Indians, being having excellent ‘shock absorbing capabilities’ are used to all these after all!
It’s no wonder why the report is disturbing to the core. Among the various unsettling facts underlined in it, just a few will be more than enough to understand the diameter of income and gender inequalities currently existing in the country and it won’t tantamount to an exaggeration if called limitless. A female domestic worker will need 22,277 years to earn what a top CEO of a tech company earns annually and women and girls put in 3.26 billion hours of unpaid care work every 365 days which in terms of contribution to the economy in monetary value is at least Rs 19 lakh crore a year, which is 20 times the whole education spending of Rs 93,000 crore as it was in last annual budget. No doubt there are deep fault lines that are contributing to this mess. But the hard-to-digest fact is they are actually deepening and as the economy continues to fumble with gigantic unemployment and disappearance of even basic purchasing power from the majority of population, pockets of billionaires are only inflating. And it’s no secret at whose expense this is happening.
The report has once again exposed the harsh reality that rich-poor gap is getting outrageously wider and since it has come just before the budget, it will now be interesting to see how reversal measures, if any, come. It’s not unknown who are massively under-taxed and what needs to be prioritised to minimise this gargantuan inequality. But the question is, to what extent ‘courage’ will be displayed to take the nation from ‘for a fortunate few’ to fortunate many. 

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Kenter Joya Riba

(Managing Editor)
      She is a graduate in Science with post graduation in Sociology from University of Pune. She has been in the media industry for nearly a decade. Before turning to print business, she has been associated with radio and television.
Email: kenterjoyaz@easternsentinel.in / editoreasternsentinel@gmail.com
Phone: 0360-2212313

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