Poor-rich gap widens as India’s wealth concentrates among over 9,17,000 millionaires
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India has been ranked among the countries that are most unequal in terms of wealth distribution, as the gap between the poor and the rich has widened to such an extent that the country’s ranking stands apart from others, most of which perform better on human development indicators, while India continues to reel under economic strain, despite headline growth and rising private wealth at the top.
The latest Global Wealth Report 2025 by UBS places India eighth among the ten most unequal countries globally, underscoring that inequality, rather than aggregate wealth creation, defined the country’s economic reality through 2024.
The report shows that India’s level of wealth inequality has reached a point where it now matches that of the United States, even though the latter is far richer overall and performs better across a range of social and economic parameters.
This comparison is anchored in the Gini coefficient, a widely used measure of inequality, where India and the United States both recorded a score of 0.74, indicating an extreme concentration of wealth. While sections of the Indian population have experienced economic improvement, the report suggests that these gains have been uneven and insufficient to offset the growing concentration at the top, according to The Wire report.
One of the stark contrasts highlighted is the divergent trajectory of inequality over time, as inequality declined significantly in the United States between 2019 and 2024, whereas it rose in India over the same period. India was among a small group of countries where inequality worsened during these years, placing it among the most unequal nations in the UBS sample of 56 countries.
The report also finds that India’s real average wealth per adult declined in 2024 and that average wealth at the start of 2025 was lower in real terms than it had been five years earlier, and although the decline in 2024 was modest, it occurred in a context of high inequality, meaning that wealth contractions were felt more acutely by ordinary households while a small affluent segment remained relatively insulated.
At the same time, India’s median wealth rose by nearly 6.6% in real terms in 2024 when measured in local currency, suggesting that a section of the population is seeing gradual improvement, while the divergence between falling average wealth and rising median wealth points to a widening gap between the wealthiest households and the rest.
The growth in India’s millionaire population added another layer to this pattern, as the number of dollar-millionaires rose by 4.4% in 2024, with about 39,000 new entrants, taking the total to more than 9,17,000. This concentration of wealth creation at the top strengthened the imbalance captured by the Gini coefficient, even as broader gains remained slow.
