7 min readMar 4, 2022 07:34 PM IST
First published on: Mar 4, 2022 at 07:28 PM IST
Written by Srishty Anand
Oxfam’s report, ‘Inequality Kills 2022’, released in January ahead of the Davos meeting, revealed some shocking facts about the growing gap between the rich and poor in India and the world. For one, the 10 richest men doubled their fortunes in a pandemic while the incomes of 99 per cent of humanity fell. Politicians, journalists, economists and activists acknowledged and expressed grave concerns about the growing inequality. Some also countered this by alluding to the stance that an individual’s wealth is a function of their hard work. This is a dangerous assumption and a false equivalence that must be expelled. I will try to clear this by using two concepts, equality of opportunity and human rights. I also hope to explain why Oxfam India’s report ‘Inequality Kills’ (referred to as “the report”) starts with the claim that 98 Indians own the same amount of wealth as the bottom 55.2 crore Indian citizens.
Inequality as a sociological concept is an unequal distribution of wealth, resources, opportunity and rewards. These inequalities precede us because individuals, you and me, are born into unequal conditions — differentiation in levels of power, status and wealth, which is a reality of any society. In contrast, there is conscious and intentional planning to create equal opportunities as a means to offset inequality of conditions. This is done by budgetary allocation on social spending — education, pension, rural job guarantees to name a few. While the report begins with stating the wealth inequality, it later dives into societal conditions of healthcare, education and nutrition levels. The inaccessibility to these creates suffering and precipitates inequality of this magnitude.
One way of equalising these basic conditions would be to follow Amartya Sen’s “capacity framework”. It focuses on giving individuals actual opportunities (argued in the report as imparting quality education, better healthcare by reducing out-of-pocket expenses, access to adequate food) so that they have the freedom to pursue the life they want — the outcomes of life. That is why the report emphasises the basic levels of living and well-being for individuals to have control over their lives. To reiterate what the report said, we are not there yet. That is the fundamental inequality we need to recognise before blindly reading numbers. This should also help differentiate individualised “hard work” or “talent” from a socially structured spectrum of socio-economic conditions. Both exist: We are trained in the system of meritocracy (progress and success are based on ability) where the markers of the latter are invisibilised or erased.
Why is the report calling out the wealthy? Why are they responsible for undoing this inequality? The answer to that, simple yet powerful, is human rights.
A crucial point to remember when reading the list of top 100 wealthy Indians is that every individual in it (nearly all men) is the face of a thriving multinational business. Human rights discourse began in the post-war period when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948 “as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.” As the world was moving towards a system of self-regulating states these norms and practices were conceived to protect every person from threats by the state. In 1966, the aspirational goals of this Declaration were turned into obligations by two Covenants. They are the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The former includes the right to work and to just conditions of work, participate in trade unions, to social security, adequate standards of living, health, education, leisure, etc and the latter refers to “right to life, liberty, and security of the person; fair trial and equal protection of the law; the right not to be subjected to torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment; not to be subjected to slavery, servitude, or forced labour; freedom of movement, thought, and conscience; the right to peaceful assembly, family, and privacy; and the right to participate in the public affairs of one’s country.”
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The Declaration with the two covenants constitutes the “International Bill of Human Rights”. This is significant because India has ratified it and in its own constitution endows each person with inalienable and indivisible rights to work, wages, education as elaborated in the report. The state is obligated to ensure that these rights are met.
With the liberalisation of trade activities and privatisation throughout the world, people had to be protected not just from the states, as was preconceived, but also from businesses and corporations. These private entities by means of foreign investments and seamless communication were/are deepening their spread in the remotest corners of the world, across territorial borders. They are functioning as legitimate non-state actors across the world and these operations have both positive and negative outcomes. The positives have been recognised by so many readers of the report, job creation, competitiveness, choices of products and innovation. But not many are willing to see — primarily because of dissociation of the wealthy and their wealth by a network that is well masked under names and entities that takes 11.9 million documents (the number of leaked documents in Pandora Paper investigation) — to connect the dots for a handful of ultra-rich.
This is where governance issues – both at the national and international levels – crop up. The rights of MNCs to operate across the border and expand their profit-maximisation is surging, but the domestic laws and regulations protecting people have not kept up. The adverse outcome on the environment, communities that are ecologically sensitive and resist its exploitative use — this impinges on climate change as well — remains undiscussed. The power and actions of these MNCs are outside of what domestic governance was imagined to tackle and this gap has been recognised by civil societies. The wealth inequality in some ways is an accrual of this unchecked sustained exploitation that fails to be recognised as adverse or negative.
To sum up, as the report states, it is the responsibility and duty of the state and the wealthy who run the MNCs to start undoing the gap and restore the rights of people. Progressive taxation is definitely a recommendation that should be actualised but both global and local businesses need to be regulated without further harming human rights. Even if it is just a small start towards creating equal opportunities, that is strong enough to bring a favourable change. People ought to be educated to learn about how businesses — and the fortunes of certain individuals — are growing at this exponential rate. The lack of recognition of these human rights has globalised inequality.
Srishty Anand is a research and knowledge specialist at Oxfam India. Views are personal
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