The Inequality Virus — India Supplement 2021

The Coronavirus pandemic has been the world’s worst public health crisis in a hundred years. It has triggered an economic crisis which is comparable in its scale only with the Great Depression of the 1930s. The contraction of GDP globally because of the pandemic is estimated by the World Bank to be 5.2 percent in 2020; the number of countries registering per capita contractions is the largest the world has seen since 1870. 

During the pandemic, many billionaires saw a rise in their wealth. Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man saw a rise to USD 185.5 billion and the wealth of Elon Musk increased to USD 179.2 billion, as of 18 January, 2021. Other tech giants like Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer saw their wealth surge by USD15 billion since March 2020. Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom, too saw a sharp rise in his wealth, which is reportedly worth USD 2.58 billion.

Our global report shows that global billionaires’ wealth rose by 19 percent during this time. The world’s 500 richest people gained USD 809 billion this year, a 14 percent increase since January 202010 while 100 million people were pushed into poverty. The pandemic also risked the income of the world’s poorest population which might potentially get reduced to USD 50 million a day in developing countries where millions of people live just above the poverty line.

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The report notes that billionaires such as Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani, Shiv Nadar, Cyrus Poonawalla, Uday Kotak, Azim Premji, Sunil Mittal, Radhakrishan Damani, Kumar Manglam Birla and Laxmi Mittal working in sectors like coal, oil, telecom, medicines, pharmaceuticals, education, and retails increased their wealth exponentially since March 2020 when India announced world’s biggest COVID-19 lockdown and economy came to standstill. On the other hand, data has shown that 170,000 people lost their jobs every hour in the month of April 2020. 

Read our latest report:  The Inequality Virus—Davos India Supplement 2021

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