Upper caste share in billionaire wealth

World Inequality Lab numbers show the caste composition of India’s richest

Caste shows, even in riches. More than 85 per cent of total billionaire wealth in the country belongs to those of upper caste communities.

People of the scheduled castes (SC) comprised 2.6 per cent of such wealth in 2022 compared to 88.4 per cent by the upper castes, according to additional data shared with Business Standard by researchers of the World Inequality Lab following the publication of their May 2024 study, ‘Towards Tax Justice and Wealth Redistribution in India: Proposals based on latest inequality estimates’, by authors Nitin Kumar Bharti of New York University; Lucas Chancel of Harvard Kennedy School; and Thomas Piketty and Anmol Somanchi of the Paris School of Economics.

The other backward class (OBC) share was 9 per cent and there were no billionaires of the scheduled tribes (ST). The researchers used publicly available billionaire lists and applied manual coding and an algorithm ‘Outkast’ to determine caste (chart 1, click image for interactive link).

The data suggests that OBC billionaires’ wealth has declined and those of upper castes have gotten richer.

“This is driven by the fact that the new billionaires that have been added in recent years have largely only been upper castes,” said Somanchi.

Caste shapes educational, health, social networks and access to credit: Such factors likely facilitate entrepreneurship and wealth generation. Dalits were prohibited from owning land in many parts, excluding them from land markets, affecting economic progress, he said.

The study ties in with research elsewhere. A lower proportion of SCs and STs own an enterprise relative to their share in the workforce, according to data in the State of Working India, 2023 report by Azim Premji University.

“…not only are general category owners over-represented in all enterprise sizes but their over-representation increases with increase in size of the enterprise,” said the university study.

While scheduled castes’ share of the workforce is 19.3 per cent, 11.4 per cent owned an enterprise. The share of scheduled tribes in the workforce is 10.1 per cent but 5.4 per cent of them own an enterprise (chart 2).

Caste shapes wealth outside the billionaire list. Just 12.3 per cent of the scheduled caste community is in the highest wealth quintile, according to data from the government’s National Family Health Survey. It is 5.4 per cent for the scheduled tribe community. More than 25 per cent of the SC population is the lowest category by wealth, while it is 46.3 per cent for the ST community. The other backward class community has 16.3 per cent of its population in the lowest wealth category and 19.2 per cent in the highest wealth category (chart 3).