Hurun India Rich List 2025 reveals what’s wrong with India’s growth model

If you think India is headed for “Viksit Bharat@2047” – a developed nation with higher income and living standard for average Indians – perish the thought. The robust GDP growth is enriching a minuscule few, not the average Indian. This is what the Hurun India Rich list of 2025, released a few days ago, demonstrates.

For a better perspective, consider its last four lists for 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025, which are comparable given that the previous years’ cumulative wealth of ultra-rich Indians is either in terms of growth or USD.

The Hurun’s lists track Indians with a net wealth of Rs 1,000 crore or more.

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Its lists show, the number of ultra-rich Indians and their cumulative wealth are going up – from 1,013 individuals with a cumulative net wealth of Rs 100 lakh crore in 2022 to 1,319 individuals with Rs 109 lakh crore in 2023, 1,539 individuals with Rs 159 lakh crore in 2024 and 1,683 individuals with Rs 167 lakh crore in 2025.

How GDP growth fuels the few

Another way to make sense of this is by comparing their cumulative wealth to the size of India’s GDP — or its GDP equivalent — even though GDP measures income, not wealth. This approach isn’t unusual; Hurun reports and several economists use it to offer a better perspective.

Here is how it looks from this perspective.

The total wealth of ultra-rich Indians in the 2022 list amounted to 42.4 per cent of the GDP of FY22, it went down to 40.5 per cent of the GDP in FY23, shot up to 52.8 per cent of the GDP in FY24 and lowered to 50.5 per cent of the GDP in FY25. All the GDP numbers are in current prices.

What would happen to India’s per capita GDP if the wealth of these few ultra-rich individuals were deducted from the GDP?

For example, in FY25, Indians’ average income or per capita GDP would crash from Rs 2.3 lakh to Rs 1.2 lakh. In USD terms, this would be $1,321 – at an exchange rate of Rs 88.

That is, the average income of Indians is lower than that of Sub-Saharan Africa’s $1,516 in 2024 (World Bank data), when India’s was $2,697.

Here is how the average Indian’s income stands vis-à-vis others.

As per the World Banks data for 2024, Indians’ average income was a little higher than lower-middle income countries’ $2,518 (India is part of this grouping) but lower than middle-income countries’ $6,524, China’s $13,303, the EU’s $43,145, the UK’s $52,637 (the country India overtook in GDP size a couple of years ago) and the US’s $85,810.

Widening wealth and income gaps

The Hurun reports are further corroborated by the World Inequality Lab’s 2024 report, “Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj”, which was a work of French economist Thomas Piketty and his colleagues.

For the uninitiated, Piketty, like Keynes, Stiglitz and Krugman, is a capitalist/liberal economist – not a Marxist.

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Their 2024 report tracks Indians’ wealth (from 1922 to 2023) and income (from 1922 to 2022). The following graph uses its data to map the wealth shares of the top 0.1 per cent (closest to 0.0001 per cent of the population of 1,683 ultra-rich Indians in the Hurun’s 2025 list) versus the rest 99.9 per cent. The choice of years is dictated by the report’s data.

This graph is representative not only of the movements in wealth shares of the top 1 and 10 per cent vis-a-vis the rest (the middle 40 per cent and the bottom 50 per cent) but also income shares for all these groups. The report made that clear, focusing more on the top 1 and 10 per cent groups: “Overall, top 1% and top 10% income and wealth shares track each other quite closely over the entire period of our study.” This is not surprising because studies have shown, across the world that income and wealth move in the same direction, if not by the same magnitude.

Here is another set of data from their study that shows how both wealth and income shares of the top 0.1 per cent are going up. Piketty and his colleagues use the most comprehensive data to measure the wealth and income of Indians.

Note, both the graphs map the wealth and income shares of just 0.1 per cent of ultra-rich Indians, not the top 1 or 10 per cent, to understand the enormity of the gaps.

Also note, in both the graphs, wealth and income shares of the top 0.1 per cent were low and falling before suddenly changing course and zooming after 1981. This will become clearer from the 2017 study by Lucas Chancel and Piketty on income levels (not wealth), “Indian income inequality, 1922-2015: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?”

The following image is taken from that study, which is, again, a true representative of the general trends for all income groups (also, by extension, wealth groups).

It shows how the income shares of the top 10 per cent were falling and that of the middle 40 per cent was rapidly rising after the 1950s till the 1980s (the much-maligned Nehruvian socialist era) – that is, the inequality of income was shrinking.

Policies widening the divide

In the mid-1980s, this trend reversed.

This happened after India took to the neoliberal economic path – better known as liberalisation of the economy that began in the mid-1980s but got a big lift in 1991, liberalising industry, trade and capital market. This shift was in line with global trends, as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) imposed neoliberal economic policies on countries that sought their financial assistance or bailouts.

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India was forced by the IMF to follow suit when it sought a bailout from the forex crisis in 1991.

Notice the yawning gap (in the image) around 2000 as the neoliberal economy gets entrenched, widening the income inequality.

Since the reversal in the 1980s was driven by economic policies, restoring the pre-1981 trends would also require reviving some of those earlier approaches. The same would be necessary to prevent inequality from widening further in the future.

The real threat is that this gap in wealth and income shares would widen even more rapidly in the coming years. The Hurun’s list merely reflects that.

Here are a few policies pushing that yawning gap further.

Business-friendly, not market-friendly

Many eminent economists have flagged India’s policy reversals since 2014, when protectionist walls were created, private monopolies were encouraged, national assets were rapidly handed over to a select few private industries, regulators were sent to strategic sleep, etc.

The growth model adopted in post-2014 India is often called the “national champions” model. These select “national champions” are not only being actively helped to develop private monopolies, but they are also glorified as “wealth creators” that Indians must welcome and even “worship” (as BJP MP KJ Alphons said in Rajya Sabha for “Ambani, Adani” in 2022).

The prime minister himself had said, from the Red Fort, on August 15, 2019: “We should stop viewing our Wealth Creators with suspicion: they deserve greater respect. Greater wealth creation will lead to greater distribution and help in the welfare of poor people.” In 2024, the prime minister told private businesses that they were the wealth creators and an important driver of growth. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman warned the Parliament in 2021 that “unless wealth creators create wealth,” there would be nothing to redistribute among the poor.

Crony capitalism fuels inequality

True, private wealth creators drive growth – typically, which leads to wealth (and income) surge to the very top – but don’t really benefit average Indians as is being projected by the government.

Here are a few examples to dispel the illusions.

Former RBI Deputy Governor Viral Acharya wrote a paper in 2023 that sought immediate “dismantling (of) the largest conglomerates”. He named those “The Big 5” and also identified: “The Big-5 are Reliance (Mukesh Ambani) Group, Tata Group, Aditya Birla Group, Adani Group, and Bharti Telecom.” He sought their dismantling because they created artificial inflation and killed competition through their rising market power.

He wrote, the Big 5 were able to set prices “substantially higher than competitors in the market” in several sectors like the retail, resources and telecommunication due to their control, and they were helped in this by “sky-high tariffs” – which shielded them from foreign competition. About the “national champions” (another name for crony capitalists), he wrote: “Creating national champions, which is considered by many as the industrial policy of ‘new India,’ appears to be feeding directly into keeping prices at a high level.”

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So, the tariff walls were aimed at protecting them. The inverted tax structure under the GST, particularly in textiles, has also been attributed to this monopoly power.

Policies rewarding corporate monopolies

Many other policy decisions directly flow from this model of growth.

One is the substantially cheaper Russian oil India imported since 2022 (which went up to as high as 45 per cent of total crude import). It fattened the oil refiners’ kitty. Retail petrol and diesel prices remained unchanged, thereby depriving average Indians of the benefits of cheap crude.

Financial Times wrote on August 8, 2025: “Indian refiners had gained $16 billion in extra profit from importing discounted Russian oil, with almost $6 billion (or over Rs 50,000 crore) of that going to Reliance Industries.” These refiners included oil PSUs too.

Now India is facing a 25 per cent penalty tariff from the US because of this cheap crude, and ironically, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) defended this import by offering an absurd logic of acting in “national interests and economic security”.

Another example.

In 2019, the Adani group, with no prior experience of running airports or in aviation, was handed over all six top-earning public airports across the country in one go. It became the largest private airport operator overnight. That happened despite strong objections from the FinMin and NITI Aayog for creating a private monopoly. The group has now added a few more airports. The group has built up monopolies in several sectors and is emerging as one in several others in a few years (ports, power, mining, cement, etc.).

Regulators aiding corporate power

The Competition Commission of India (CCI), which is supposed to check monopolies from emerging, has been in a strategic slumber for a decade now. Even as the Opposition questions its very raison d'être, and data based on the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), a measure of market concentration, shows record highs in telecom, airlines, cement, steel, and tyres in 2024, the CCI refuses to wake up.

In December 2024, former CEA Arvind Subramanian and his colleagues flagged a “radical change” in the RBI policy on forex rate policy. In 2022, the RBI abandoned the market-determined rupee value without explaining why, to actively intervene in the forex market to keep the rupee buoyed. They wrote it “led to a loss of about $200 billion over three episodes, with over $50 billion lost since end-September alone”.

They concluded that though the RBI never disclosed why it changed its policy, reducing the effective foreign borrowing (ECB) cost “was one of its main effects” and this was so effective that ECBs took off despite rising dollar interest rate. A few private corporates tapped the ECBs to fund infrastructure projects. But eventually, overall private investment did not take off, and it is possible that the major effect of the ‘subsidy’—the reduction in exchange rate volatility—was that firms merely substituted foreign borrowing for domestic financing," they added.

They argued that this shift in policy “reduced export competitiveness and rendered monetary policy inappropriate for a slowing economy”.

Growth without shared prosperity

Now, on October 3, 2025, the RBI proposed to encourage more ECBs by (i) relaxing limits on ECBs that NBFCs can raise and (ii) revising upward the ECB limits for corporates from $750 million to $1 billion. On October 1, the RBI governor proposed to withdraw the 2016 framework that capped bank credit to a corporate at Rs 10,000 crore or above. This is despite the Finance Ministry telling the Lok Sabha on March 17, 2025, that scheduled commercial banks (SCBs) had written off Rs 16.35 lakh crore of corporate loan defaults (NPAs) in 10 fiscals of FY15-FY24.

Who gains from such measures? A few corporates – not necessarily the economy or average Indians.

Since the pandemic hit in 2020, corporate profits have soared (“swimming in excess profits,” as the Economic Survey 2023–24 noted) even as sales declined. Yet, neither private corporate capex has revived nor have quality jobs been created. Instead, the surge in profits has been accompanied by “creeping informalisation” and stagnant or low wages and salaries.

To sum up, private “wealth creators” are proving more of a burden.

In short, monopolies kill competition and competitors, profiteer without investing in capacity building or creating quality jobs, and ultimately impoverish average Indians. The evidence is in the fact that over 800 million Indians, or 58 per cent of the Indian population, survive on “free” ration, more than 100 million each get cash handouts (PM-KISAN) and subsidised LPG cylinders and an average of 66 million rural Indians work as menial labour at below statutory minimum wages under the job guarantee scheme of MGNREGS.

Development dream or delusion

With the current set of economic policies, making India a developed country or “Viksit Bharat@2047” is a mere illusion.

The rhetoric about making India a developed nation by 2047 is often just circular logic.

On October 3, 2025, for example, the Finance Minister was addressing a three-day Kautilya Economic Conclave (KEC) 2025 in New Delhi, the theme of which was “Seeking prosperity in turbulent times”. She said the prime minister had put “twin track” in motion for building a prosperous India, which she named as “Viksit Bharat@2047” and “atmanirbharta (self-reliance)”.

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Two days earlier, on October 1, 2025, the prime minister was addressing the centenary celebrations of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological fountainhead of the ruling establishment. He said the RSS has a “roadmap” for making India a “developed nation”. He identified “dependence on foreign countries, conspiracies to divide the nation, and infiltration” as key challenges to India’s goal of becoming a developed nation.

Subsequently, he listed the RSS’s “Panch Parivartan” guides it prescribed for its own cadre to make India a developed nation: (a) “Sva-Bodh (self-awareness)”, (b) “Samajik Samrasta (social harmony)”, (c) “Kutumb Prabodhan (family awakening)”, (d) “Nagrik Shishtachar (civic sense)” and (e) “Paryavaran (environment)”.

This “roadmap” hardly needs explaining.