India’s Billionaire Raj Eats the Bottom 50%
Engineered stagnation below, compounding wealth above, and growth as the cover story.
India is burning.
Not literally. Not yet. But the World Inequality Report 2026 documents a country sitting on a powder keg of its own making.
The narrative told in Mumbai boardrooms goes like this: India is rising. A billion people lifting themselves from poverty. A growth story for the ages. Democracy proving capitalism works.
The data tells a different story.
India has become one of the most unequal societies on Earth. More unequal than during the British Colonial Raj. The economic stratification under home-grown billionaires now exceeds what existed under foreign occupation.
The top 1% holds 40% of the nation’s entire wealth. The top 10% captures 58% of national income. The bottom 50%? Seven hundred million people receiving just 15%.
Seven hundred million people holding almost nothing in a country celebrating itself as an economic powerhouse.
The World Inequality Lab researchers found no change in income shares for the bottom half over recent years. Zero movement. The celebrated growth gets captured entirely at the top. Every rupee funneled upward while the bottom half treads water.
This isn’t accidental.
The Indian oligarchy, what the researchers call the Billionaire Raj, serves as enforcement for global capital. They maintain a low-wage labor regime that attracts foreign investment while enriching themselves. Junior partners in a global extraction machine.
In 1980, Indian billionaires barely registered on global wealth maps. By 2025, they’re fixtures of the international oligarchy. India combines advanced capitalist accumulation with archaic misery. Tech billionaires and space programs alongside feudal agrarian relations and mass malnutrition.
The contradictions are everywhere.
Take healthcare. The government promotes Ayushman Bharat, a health insurance scheme promising coverage up to Rs 500,000.
The average claim settlement is Rs 11,787.
Delayed reimbursements. Coverage disputes. Hospitals that won’t accept the insurance. But it accomplishes something crucial: it replaces actual public healthcare with financialized insurance funneling public money into private hospital networks.
Public goods transformed into profit centers.
The people left behind aren’t abstract statistics. They’re women, primarily.
Female labor force participation sits at 15%. One of the lowest rates in the world. The global average is 49%. In India, 85% of women are locked out of formal economic participation.
Patriarchal family structures. Lack of safe transportation. Absence of childcare. When women can’t work, families can’t accumulate wealth. When families can’t accumulate wealth, they remain dependent and easier to exploit.
The gender dimension isn’t separate from the inequality crisis. It’s central to maintaining it.
Environmental dimensions compound everything. India’s oligarchs profit from carbon-intensive industries. When climate disasters strike—floods, droughts, heat waves—the poor suffer while the rich remain insulated.
The bottom 50% contributes almost nothing to emissions but absorbs catastrophic impacts. Flooded villages. Destroyed crops. Displacement.
The government’s response? Performance.
Grand schemes with inspiring names. Development rhetoric. Beneath it all, systematic dismantling of whatever threadbare social protections existed.
Education follows the same pattern. Infrastructure investment concentrates in wealthy areas. Rural schools lack teachers, buildings, materials. The children of the bottom 50% receive education designed to prepare them for servitude, not advancement.
This is the actual function of the system.
The Indian oligarchy understands its role perfectly. They’re not building a prosperous nation for all. They’re building a low-cost labor platform for global capital while skimming their cut. The bottom 50% must stay desperate enough to work for nothing.
The social infrastructure that might allow upward mobility gets systematically destroyed or privatized. What replaces it are schemes that sound progressive but function as wealth extraction dressed in social concern.
The British Raj extracted wealth through explicit imperial administration. They were open about plunder as policy.
The Billionaire Raj achieves worse inequality through domestic institutions. Financial instruments instead of direct seizure. Insurance schemes instead of gunpoint extraction. But the result is identical. A tiny elite appropriating the labor and resources of hundreds of millions.
The celebrated growth flows past the majority entirely, siphoned off before reaching their hands.
This is India’s growth story. Seven hundred million people with nothing watching 1% take 40% of everything. Women locked out. Public goods privatized. Healthcare theater. Education sorted by class.
The researchers document this with precision. They track flows, map extraction. What they document isn’t poverty.
It’s theft.
Systematic, sophisticated, accelerating theft.
The Billionaire Raj isn’t failing to lift people up. It’s succeeding at keeping them down.
That’s the point.
Numbers:
Devastating breakdown of how inequality gets engineered. The stat on female labor participation (15% vs 49% global average) is the missing piec that most economic analysis ignores. Locking 85% of women out of formal work isn't a cultural accident - it's a structural mechanism for keeping household wealth accumulation near zero. When families cant save, they stay desperate, which keeps wages suppressed. I've watched simillar dynamics in garment supply chains across South Asia and it's always the same playbook.