The Bombay Stock Exchange is on fire, reported a pink paper last week. This incendiary event, however, was a cause for celebration, not panic. For the hot news was, the sensex had crossed the ‘‘magical figure’’ of 9,000. Magical indeed. A jump from 7,000 to 9,000 in five months. The last 1,000-point leap in just 50 days. With BSE’s market-cap now standing at Rs 22,24,708 crore, this means an addition of nearly Rs 50,000 crore in 150 days. Barring the magic of money making more money on stocks, which real-life economic activity can create so much wealth so fast? Expect the media to soon feature which Indian businessman has got richer by how many more hundred crores.Obviously, these are jolly good times for the share-owning section of Indian society. Trouble is, there is a vast section of our economy and society that has no ‘‘share’’ in the sensex-generated wealth. On the contrary, every surge on BSE only serves to highlight the widening gulf that separates India Un-incorporated from India Inc. Which prompts me to shift the focus from BSE’s sensitive index to another index that’s far more sensitive to the aspirations of most Indians — namely, the Gini coefficient. Development economists use this index (conceived by Italian statistician Corrado Gini) to measure income inequality. It ranges between 0 and 1, where 0 implies perfect equality and 1 connotes total inequality. Estimates of the Gini coefficient in India vary, from 0.37 to 0.42. After remaining more or less constant for the first four decades after independence, it has been steadily rising after the advent of liberalisation and globalisation. Actually, we don’t need an economist to tell us that income inequality — also inequality in access to clean drinking water, decent housing, good education, proper healthcare, etc. — is rising. Cast a glance at urban or rural India, and you’ll have ample proof that India, though far more prosperous today than ever before, is also far more iniquitous now than ever before.In this, India conforms to a grotesque global pattern. The UN Human Development Report notes that incomes are distributed most unequally across the world’s people, with a Gini coefficient of 0.66 globally. The richest 5% in the world corner 114 times the income of the poorest 5%. The richest 1% have as much as the poorest 57%. The 2.5 crore richest Americans earn as much as 200 crore of the world’s poorest people. The poorest 20% in the world saw their share of the global income dip from 2.3% to 1.4% in the past 30 years. Meanwhile, the share of the richest 20% rose from 70% to 85%, much of it coming from stock and financial markets. Globalisation may be a boon to humanity in many ways, but none can deny that it has also globalised inequality.These days, India’s policymakers are paying a lot of adulatory attention to China — and for good reason. But they must also listen to the warning bells. China’s fast-growing inequality is cleaving Chinese society and is likely to produce severe socio-political friction in the coming years. Recently, People’s Daily reported that China’s Gini coefficient has increased to 0.45, (it was 0.34 as recently as in 1999) indicating that inequality in ‘‘communist’’ China has surpassed that of ‘‘capitalist’’ US. Calling it a ‘‘yellow alert’’, the newspaper warned that, at this rate, China could reach the ‘‘red alert’’ in five years. No wonder, protest actions by peasants and workers across China shot up from 58,000 in 2003 to 74,000 in 2004.In juxtaposing sensex with ‘‘inex’’ (inequality index), I do not wish to deny the importance of the former or belittle the critical role of the corporate sector in India’s economy. What is questionable, however, is the disproportionate attention that our policymakers and the media devote to corporatised businesses and the corresponding neglect of other sectors of the economy, on which the well-being of a majority of our population depends. This has happened because, with Marxist socialism having earned disrepute globally, it has become almost a taboo to talk of egalitarianism as a national or global ideal. Anyone who raises concerns about inequality is silenced with the favourite poser of the apologists of unbridled capitalism: ‘‘How can you distribute from the national cake until the cake itself is enlarged?’’ As the statistical sample cited above shows, the poor majority gets only the crumbs even when the cake gets bigger. As for the rich minority, the present system enables it to grab larger pieces than before.God has willed that humans create a just and egalitarian society for the happiness and benefit of the largest numbers — Bahujan Sukhay, Bahujan Hitay. Instead, we’ve created a system that plays favourites, that condemns crores of people outside the charmed circles of the corporate sector to accept unequal incomes and unequal opportunities in perpetuity, and that seeks to banish egalitarianism from the parlance of economics, politics and governance. Such a system is unsustainable. It needs to be reformed.Write to sudheenkulkarni@expressindia.com
