A report by New World Wealth has ranked India as the seventh richest nation in the world with a total individual wealth of $5,600 billion. India is ranked ahead of Canada, Australia and Italy. The US of course is the richest nation with a total wealth of $48,900 billion followed by China and Japan with $17,400 billion and $15,100 billion, respectively. Wealth is defined as the net assets of a person and includes property, cash, equities,
business interests, etc. This report would definitely be of interest to the central government which would want to tom-tom this achievement, but meaningless to the families of farmers who committed suicide because they were unable to repay
crop loans.
If India is the seventh richest nation, then why are people in
Canada, Australia and Italy better off? Why and how do people
in these three nations enjoy a better lifestyle, while we wallow
in dirt and chaos? Why are citizens of India migrating to nations
that are poorer than us when
it should be the other way round?
The reason is, when you take all the
wealth and divide it by the population,
it is insignificant. In fact when
this simple division is undertaken,
about 200 million people end up on
the wrong side of the poverty line.
You may curse the government for
not being able to stem the population
growth or praise it as a demographic dividend, but the
truth is that when $5,600 billion is spread across 1.27 billion
people India drops to the fourth quarter of the list. Even Sri
Lanka is ahead of us.
The ranking given by New World Wealth does not tell the
whole story. India has islands of excellence and pockets of
well developed areas, but there are great many people who
struggle with the basic necessities of life. India is home to 194
million hungry people. In rural areas over 50 per cent of the
population opt for open defecation while in urban areas the
figure is 25 per cent. A report by WaterAid stated that India has
the most number of people in the world who don’t have access
to clean drinking water. About 140,000 children die every year
from diarrhoea-related disease as a consequence of drinking
contaminated water.
Anyone who glances at the larger picture that is India, will
realise that the ‘seventh richest nation’ tag is quite insignificant
and misleading. But the import from this report is that it
gives us a rough idea of how much more wealth India has to
generate to pull people out of poverty. The real challenge lies
is formulating a policy to push the country into double digit
growth, or being rich will mean nothing to the man at the bottom
of the heap.
