Rahul targets PM, says 1 pc of India's super rich own 4 times more wealth than 1 billion poor

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Monday targeted Prime Minister Narendra Modi over a report that said the total wealth of 63 Indian billionaires was more than the last year's Union Budget.

Gandhi in a tweet accused Prime Minister Modi of "extracting wealth from poor" and giving it to "his crony capitalist friends".

He said one per cent of India's super-rich have four times more wealth than one billion of the country's poor.

"Modi extracts wealth from poor and gives it to his crony capitalist friends and the big power brokers he's dependent on. 1% of India's super-rich, now own 4 times more wealth than 1 Billion of India's poor," said Gandhi.

A new report from Oxfam released on Monday ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos said the combined total wealth of 63 Indian billionaires was higher than the total Union Budget for this fiscal at Rs 24.42 lakh crore.

The world's 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people, who make up 60 per cent of the planet's population, it said.

The report said that top one per cent of Indians hold more than four times the amount of wealth held by 953 million people or the bottom 70 per cent of the population.

The report said that it will take a female domestic worker 22,277 years to earn a top CEO of a tech company makes in one year.

It said women and girls put in 3.26 billion hours of unpaid care work each and every day -- a contribution to the Indian economy of at least Rs 19 lakh crore a year which is 20 times the entire education budget of India in 2019 (Rs 93,000 crore), the report said.