According to Credit Suisse, India has 237,000 members of the top 1 per cent of global wealth holders. There are 1,500 UHNW individuals with wealth over $ 50 million and 700 with more than $100 million.

New Delhi: As many as 84,000 Indians are expected to become millionaires by 2017, according to a global wealth report.

"India is likely to see a substantial jump of 53 percent in the number of millionaires to 84,000 by 2017," Credit Suisse Research Institute's Global Wealth Report said.

It said the number of millionaires in emerging economies is expected to jump substantially in the next few years.

China could see its number double by 2017 to almost 2 million, it said.

On India, it said, "while wealth has been rising strongly, and the ranks of the middle class and wealthy have been swelling, not everyone has shared this growth and there is still a great deal of poverty".

This is reflected in the fact that almost everyone in India (95 percent) has wealth below $10,000, while at the other end, a very small proportion of the population (just 0.3 percent) has a net worth over $100,000.

According to Credit Suisse, India has 237,000 members of the top 1 per cent of global wealth holders. There are 1,500 UHNW individuals with wealth over $ 50 million and 700 with more than $100 million.

The report said that falling growth rate has seen India shedding $700 billion from its household wealth during mid-2011 to mid-2012 period, the steepest in Asia as this is 50 percent of the total erosion that the continent has seen.

"There's no question that the economic uncertainties of the past year - particularly those affecting the Eurozone - have cast a huge shadow over household wealth," Credit Suisse Research Institute's Michael O'Sullivan and Richard Kersley said.

From mid-2011 to mid-2012 aggregate global household wealth fell by 5.2 per cent in current dollar terms to USD 223 trillion due to the economic uncertainties particularly those affecting the Eurozone.

During the period under consideration, Eurozone members suffered the largest losses, led by France ($ 2.2 trillion), Italy ($2.1 trillion), Germany ($ 1.9 trillion) and Spain ($870 billion).

Moreover there was also a significant rise in household debt, which rose in aggregate by 81 percent from 2000-2012.

However, despite the setbacks in 2007 and more recently, household wealth has grown strongly over the past decade, with the global aggregate doubling from the $113 trillion recorded at the start of the millennium.

A similar kind of uptrend was witnessed in the case of India as well, where aggregate wealth more than tripled during 2000 to 2011.

Household wealth is expected to rise by almost 50 percent in the next five years from $223 trillion in 2012 to $330 trillion in 2017 and the number of millionaires worldwide would reach 46 million in 2017.

PTI