| … But some are more equal than others There are parts of India that are pretty much like the richest enclaves in the US or Singapore (minus the garbage, as ubiquitous outside $8-10 million dollar apartments in Gurugram as it outside a slum in Old Gurugram; but that’s another story), and, at the other end of a really broad spectrum, there are those that would fit in well in the poorest parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Such variance isn’t unique to India — it is true for almost all countries in the world, from the richest to the poorest. I’ve written about it before, as have others, including the good folks at Venture Capital firm Blume in their Indus Valley annual report (our columnist Charles Assisi wrote about their latest report some time back). For those who like things to be laid out in black and white: there are many Indias; these are present across various levels of the income curve, but they could well be arranged in various temporal zones (some parts of India are in the 21st century; some others have just entered the 20th; and still others…). When I was very young, I remember watching a documentary on TV titled Indus Valley To Indira Gandhi — but not that young to miss the insignificance of it being renamed Where Centuries Coexist post 1977 (it reverted to its original title a few years later). But centuries do co-exist in India. Again, this isn’t unique to India. What makes it significant is size, population, and diversity. As I have written previously , by the time India is a middle income country, and likely much sooner (perhaps a decade before), India will definitely have a population as large as Germany’s with a per capita income to match (or exceed) that country’s. But it also has a large number of poor people; I’m glad the government has now stopped talking about the 800 million people they kept from going hungry during the pandemic by supplying them with free food because this immediately suggests that there are at least 800 million poor people in India (and yes, I have heard the argument about how, with food taken care of, these people used their money on discretionary purchases such as cosmetics). As the latest debate about inequality (and equality) rages, this is the diversity that everyone would do well to keep in mind. HT’s columnist Monika Halan pointed to two facts that will be hard to counter : One, India has come a long way over the past two decades; two, the country has managed to find (with at least some level of success), a balance between growth and redistribution. Economists Soumya Kanti Ghosh and Falguni Sinha explained that welfare schemes actually boost consumption — which is true — and that in terms of consumption equality, and the universally applied multiplier to convert consumption inequality into income inequality, India actually fares better than countries such as the US and the UK. But as my colleagues in HT’s data journalism team pointed out last year, there are variations within consumption inequality itself : onions are the most equally consumed items and air tickets, the least; and while the Gini co-efficient of consumption for food is 0.24 in rural areas, that for consumer durables is 0.44 (urban inequality is marginally higher for both). Interestingly, last year, around the same time, there was another big debate around inequality — like this year, prompted by another report on inequality in India. My colleague Roshan Kishore argued in a provocative column at that time that inequality wasn’t really a political issue . | 
