ALL SARKARI EXAM: An unequal future (Indian Express)

An unequal future (Indian Express)

Oxfam releasing its Annual Inequality Report ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos in January.
This report captures staggering increases in global wealth inequality over the years.
This year, the report established that the richest 1 per cent in the world have more than double the wealth of 6.9 billion people combined.
Within this 1 per cent, the world’s billionaires, just 2,135 people, have more wealth than that of the bottom 4.6 billion combined.

India has earned notoriety for its rampant inequality that seems to grow exponentially each year.
Nine of India’s billionaires own as much wealth as the bottom 50 per cent of the country’s populace and that it would take the average female domestic worker 22,277 years to earn the annual pay-out to India’s top tech CEO.

They continue to be tasked with bearing the burden of care work, and spend — on average, 352 minutes a day for this purpose. In contrast, men put in only 51.8.
As the report argues, increasing spending on social welfare could drastically reduce this burden.
India continues to allocate a little over 5 per cent of its GDP to health and education.
By tasking women with unpaid care work, we simultaneously withhold their entry into the labour force.
The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2017-18 showed a dramatic drop in women’s work participation rates, to only 16.5 per cent, while unemployment rates for the economy as a whole continued to climb.
This is a reason for concern primarily because it means that fewer and fewer women are participating in India’s labour force, and that even those who do now find themselves without work.
At a time when resolving the gender wealth gap is predicated on increasing women’s incomes, this economic outlook only points to the deepening of this divide as millennial women remain both underpaid and underemployed.

Growing wealth inequality is also symptomatic of the rise of an entrenched rentier class which looks to leverage their fixed assets in the form of land and property to extract the greatest possible rents from tenants and leases.
For our millennial professionals, this means that cities continue to grow unaffordable, and prospects of actually purchasing a home early in their career turns from optimistic to bleak.
With a 2019 study by the Reserve Bank confirming that housing affordability has significantly deteriorated over the last four years, it is unsurprising how millennials now choose to rent rather than bear the increasingly unaffordable burden of high EMIs.