The reports claiming that India is the fourth most equal country, based on data from the World Bank and carried by major newspapers in India, contradict the actual data, which shows that India ranked 176 out of 216 countries in income inequality according to 2019 data, although the newspapers that sourced the claim from the PIB are seen not to have verified it, which was based solely on consumption inequality.
The misleading reports appear to stem from a Press Information Bureau (PIB) release that incorrectly interpreted figures from a World Bank document, with many media houses publishing the story without verifying the data or the context in which it was presented, according to The Wire.
The PIB cited a consumption-based Gini index of 25.5 for India in 2022–23 to support the claim of rising equality, but this figure pertains to consumption inequality rather than income inequality, which is typically used for cross-country comparisons.
Consumption Gini indices are usually lower than income Ginis because wealthier individuals tend to save a significant share of their income, making consumption appear more equally distributed than actual earnings. The PIB’s comparison of India’s consumption Gini with other countries’ income Gini indices represents a fundamental statistical error that undermines the validity of its conclusions.
According to the World Inequality Database and corroborated by the same World Bank brief, India’s income Gini index stood at 61 in 2023, which has remained unchanged since 2019 and has risen steadily since the 1990s. This places India among the most unequal nations globally, with its ranking having slipped from 115 in 2009 to 176 in 2019. The country’s wealth inequality is even more stark, with a Gini index of 75 in 2023, indicating extreme concentration of wealth.
The World Bank brief itself does not provide any comparison of India’s consumption Gini with that of other countries and cautions that the figure may be underestimated due to significant data limitations. The methodology of India’s latest consumption survey underwent several changes compared to the previous one, rendering longitudinal comparisons unreliable.
To assess consumption inequality more accurately, analysts have turned to per capita calorie intake data, which placed India 102nd out of 185 countries in 2019, down from 82nd in 2009.