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The top 10 per cent rural households of India own 44 per cent of land, while 46 per cent of rural households are landless, according to a working paper released by World Inequality Lab. The paper, titled 'Land Inequality in India: Nature, History, and Markets', further said that the top 5 per cent households own 32 per cent of land, while 18 per cent of rural land ownership is held by the top 1 per cent. The paper is jointly authored by Nitin Kumar Bharti, David Blakeslee and Samreen Malik, drawing on one of the largest datasets ever assembled on land ownership in India, covering around 650 million people across 2,70,000 villages. "The average village land Gini (an index measuring landholding inequality on a scale of 0-100) reaches 71 when landless households are included, and 46 per cent of rural households are landless," the paper said, adding that on average, the largest landholder controls about 12 per cent of village land, and in some villages a single owner controls more than