Although India’s upper caste households earned nearly 47 percent more than the national average annual household income, the top 10 percent within these castes owned 60 percent of the wealth within the group in 2012, as per a recent paper by the World Inequality Database.

Further, the wealthiest 1 percent among them grew their wealth by nearly 16 percentage points to 29.4 percent over the decade to 2012, the paper, entitled ‘Wealth Inequality, Class and Caste in India, 1961-2012’ and published in Nov. 2018, said.

The vast inequality of income and wealth between and within castes highlighted in the paper are significant in the light of the Bharatiya Janata Party government’s new bill to entitle poorer sections among the forward castes to a 10 percent quota in government jobs and higher education institutions, which has been challenged in court.

Not only is the wealth and income gap large, it is growing--across all castes, in the 36 years till 2016, the share of wealth held by the top 10 percent has increased 24 percentage points to 55 percent, as IndiaSpend reported on Jan. 2.