Indian billionaire club swells tenfold in 10 yrs: Report

Aided by a regressive tax structure and right government connections, number of homegrown billionaires in India increased ten times in the last ten years while the country itself battles problems plaguing form runaway prices and high government deficit. The concentarion of wealth in the hands of few has grown manifold in the past few years, says a Worldwide development organisation Oxfam report, published ahead of the World Economic Forum meet in Davos.

The rich getting richer story gets intense with the fact that a mere one per cent of the world's families own almost half (46 per cent) of the world's wealth. This astonishing truth about the vast disparity has been revealed in the Oxfam report titled 'Working for the Few'. What's even more shocking is that the wealth of world's richest 85 people is same as what is owned by the bottom half of the world's population.

Tax havens around the world are being indiscriminately used to hide trillions of dollars that accelerated economic inequality, the report said.

"Wealthy elites have co-opted political power to rig the rules of the economic game, undermining democracy and creating a world where the 85 richest people own the wealth of half of the world's population," Oxfam claimed.