Just 1% of Indians hold about 40% of total wealth in the country, making income inequality in India among the highest in the world and “showing little improvement”, according to the World Inequality Report 2026, released on Wednesday.
The report, edited by economists Lucas Chancel, Ricardo Gómez-Carrera, Rowaida Moshrif, and Thomas Piketty, also said the richest 10% hold around 65% of total wealth.
The top 10% of earners capture 58% of national income, while the bottom 50% receive only 15%.
Deep Structural Divides in India
“Average annual income per capita is around $6984 (6,200 euros — purchasing power parity or PPP), and average wealth stands at about $32,592 (28,000 euros — PPP). Female labour participation remains very low at 15.7%, showing no improvement over the past decade. Overall, inequality in India remains deeply entrenched across income, wealth, and gender dimensions, highlighting persistent structural divides within the economy,” the report, prefaced by economists Jayati Ghosh and Joseph Stiglitz, said.
Piketty, co-director of the World Inequality Lab, said, “The report comes at a challenging political time, but it is more essential than ever. Only by continuing the historic movement towards equality will we be able to address the social and climate challenges of the coming decades.”
Staggering Global Concentration
The world seems to be united in inequality. A tiny slice of the global elite owns three times more wealth than the bottom half of the world’s population combined.
A little under 60,000 multimillionaires, the top 0.001% on the planet, have an average of almost €1 billion ($1.2 billion)… Their share has grown steadily from almost 4% in 1995 to over 6% today, and comes against the backdrop of the explosion of global inequalities and the weakening of multilateralism, the report said.
Meanwhile, a person in the bottom 50% of the population only owns about €6,500 ($7,550).
The report looked at the World Inequality Database, an open-access resource for global income and wealth inequality, and new research to understand inequality across different areas including income, gender and politics.
The researchers saw that even though wealth has reached “historic heights,” it remains “very unevenly distributed,” with the richest 10% of people having the largest share in personal wealth and total income worldwide. They recommend governments use progressive taxes and transfers to reduce inequality.
The study also found that women only earn 32% of what men earn per hour when considering unpaid domestic and care labour, relative to 62% when not accounting for these factors.
“Zooming further in, the concentration becomes staggering. The top 1% alone, roughly the adult population of the United Kingdom, controls 37% of global wealth. This is more than 18 times the wealth of the entire bottom half of the world population, a group as large as the combined adult populations of China, India, the US, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, and Russia,” it said.
The top one-in-a-million collectively hold 3% of global wealth, more than the bottom half of the world’s adult population.