The Economic Survey talks about how India need to focus more on Poverty Reduction than curbing Inequality. It argues that sustained Economic Growth will lead to increase in purchasing capacity of those in the bottom quintile of income distribution and thus help in lifting people out of poverty.

This is a standard Trickle Down argument. The survey claims that high inequality is co related with lower levels of socio economic indicators in developed economies like USA and UK.

But in the case of India high inequality correlates with higher levels of socio economic indicators like health, education and Life expectancy. The survey thus is of the view that Economic Growth should be the prime focus of Indian Economy and redistribution of unequal resources a later goal. The idea being to focus on increasing the share of the pie rather than redistribution of the existing pie.

What is puzzling is that it is not known if the socio-economic indicators associated with increased inequality in India are distributed evenly or are limited to a certain section of Indian population.The survey anecdotes China as a nation which has seen a massive rise in Inequality associated with massive reduction in poverty. Citing China’s example the focus is put on economic growth.But Economic Growth is invisible in india. This comparison of China is unjust. China has around half of its workforce in informal sectors of economy, whereas India has around 90 percent of its workforce enagaged in Informal economy.India’s growth is stagnated because more than half of India’s GDP is contributed to by the informal sector which grows with minimal govt support. The formal sector is not strong enough to maintain a growth that will trickle down and lead to improvement in conditions of masses. In China, the informal Economy contributes a mere 22 percent to their GDP and the formal sector is heavily industrialised and this along with a booming service sector leads to stupendous economic growth.Whereas in india much of the growth is dependent on service economy, and the industrial sector is apparently not that strong as China.On the other hand such a growth is a prime example of a neoliberal plutocracy where the Ambani’s and Adani’s wealth grows in leaps and bounds and there is no trickling down.The Economic Survey thus is a very sly attempt to keep the poor, poor and the rich richer. Something called as Sado Populism where in the Charismatic leader promises the people “Growth”, “Development” ‘Vikas” but they are seldom part of that Growth and thus the discontent brews among them. But this is balanced by the Frenzied Religious Nationalism and the economy keeps growing albeit with increasing Inequality.