Inequality
It is well known that India’s development over three decades of neo-liberal reform policies has been highly unequal. Reports have brought out that the net worth of India's billionaires has increased dramatically by 12 times in the past 15 years, enough to eliminate absolute poverty twice over in the country. Income inequality is also on the rise. India is ranked fifth in terms of number of billionaires with 70 billionaires, 17 more than in 2013. Interestingly, India has a higher number of these super rich individuals than Germany, Switzerland, France and Japan. The combined wealth of the Indians billionaires comes to a staggering Rs.26 lakh crores ($390 billion)! With further informalization of the labour force, slow growth of employment, severe agrarian crisis and cutbacks in expenditures on social protection and food, fertiliser and energy subsidies, as well as the privatization and commercialization of education and health, inequality across social classes and across the rural-urban divide has increased significantly over the period of neo-liberal policies. Besides income inequality, there are also the other axes of inequality such as gender, caste and rural/urban. In all these dimensions, the degree of inequality in terms of wealth, incomes and access to health and education have all increased substantially. Perhaps the most tragic outcome of neo-liberal policies in India has been rural distress and the worsening rural-urban divide. The deep problems in agriculture relate both to current neo-liberal policies and to the basic structure of agrarian relations in India characterised by continuing concentration of land holdings in fewer hands and increasing landlessness. Against the above background, one would have expected that the government’s development policies would be directed at reversing this trend of increasing social and economic inequality. The new government’s slogan of "sab ka saath, sab ka vikas" (i.e. development for all, with participation of all) may have given rise to expectations that steps to reduce these inequalities would be reduced. On the contrary, the key flagship development programmes of the government reveal its intention to promote greater development for the urban, better-off sections which can only worsen the inequalities noted above between rich and poor, urban and rural, and along social fault lines of caste, gender and region
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