A series of reports released in 2018 by Oxfam and World Inequality Lab pointed to monstrous inequalities across the world, but the data pertaining to India was far more intimidating. The Oxfam survey reveals that India’s richest 1% corner 73% of the national wealth (
Economic Times 2018). This picture gets murkier when we witness the increase in the number of billionaires in India from one in 1991 to 131 in 2018 (
Financial Express 2018). In fact, in 2018 alone, the wealth of billionaires in India grew by `2,200 crore, while the poorest remained in debt (Oxfam India 2019). In 2008, in a speech to the Bombay Chamber of Commerce, Raghuram Rajan (2008) evinced a threat of oligarchy in India, which did not trigger a debate at that point of time; however, in 2011, Jayant Sinha and Ashutosh Varshney wrote somewhat strongly that it is now “the time for India to rein in its robber barons” (Sinha and Varshney 2011). In a similar tone, Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote on the total silence on inequality in India, “the way we think about inequality matters a lot to the shape it takes and to the prospects for its diminishment” (Mehta 2012).