Are rich people in India getting richer while the poor get poorer?

India’s richest hundred people are far wealthier today than they were a generation ago. The combined wealth of India’s billionaires has grown faster than the economy itself. So are the rich getting richer? yes. But are the poor getting poorer? Let’s look at that next.

Think about what it meant to be poor in India in 1991. No mobile phone to call a doctor in an emergency. No bank account. Getting a TV meant months of queuing at an office that might not have processed your application. Today, a poor family in rural Rajasthan has a smartphone, a bank account, and children who have spent more years in school than any previous generation in their family. They might still be poor, but the life is significantly better than any of the previous generations. 

Now imagine being poor in Germany or Switzerland. You receive unemployment benefits that in absolute rupee terms would put you firmly in India’s middle class. You have access to world-class public hospitals, reliable public transport, and schools that require nothing of you. The difference between a poor person in India and a poor person in Germany is not just income — it is what a rich country can afford to provide even to its poorest citizens. A richer India, over time, builds exactly that capacity to protect its poor far better than a poor one can.

There is a version of this debate that says: better to be equal and poor than unequal and growing. But no one who has experienced genuine poverty believes this. The question is not how to flatten the distribution. It is how to make it easier for those at the bottom to move up.

And the evidence suggests that movement is real. The Nizam of Hyderabad — once listed as the richest person on earth — his dynasty’s wealth is largely gone. The industrial houses that dominated India during the License Raj held their position partly because barriers to entry kept everyone else out. Today, India’s wealthiest individuals include the Ambani’s, who have built one of Indias largest companies by offering people access to internet at some of world’s most affordable prices. Narayana Murthy, who founded Infosys in 1981 with ₹10,000 borrowed from his wife. The Kamath Brothers of Zerodha, who started as a sub-broker. The wealth at the top is not the same wealth it was fifty years ago. It has been built, lost, and rebuilt by different people in different generations.

Hence we should not obsess over the Gini coefficient but ask if we are removing the barriers that prevent someone from a small town from building something? Are the rules designed to let the best idea win, or to protect whoever is already inside? These are the questions that determine whether an unequal society is a fair one.

But critics of capitalism in India don’t just complain about the billionaires at the top, but also about the alleged exploitation at the bottom.