Rich must open their wallets more to remove inequalities: Piketty

Rich must open their wallets more to remove inequalities: Piketty: Thomas Piketty, author of the best-selling book ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century,’ that transformed the understanding of the history of wealth and its distribution , said for India to meet its hug



My VIEW:

January
22, 2016

Revisit inequality

This refers to the interview given to The Hindu by Thomas Piketty with focus on inequality in the Indian context (report by Puja Mehra, The Hindu, January 22). For a couple of decades now, in India, the thinking at the highest level has been in favour of reducing the role of the public sector in core sectors of the economy. We were also not able to make private sector responsible for taking care of spending in social sector
commensurate with their share in public resources. This has created an
imbalance and now, that is being bluntly told by scholars like Piketty.

In addition to defence and internal security, government has to own up responsibility for social security of the people which include an acceptable level of food security,
universal healthcare, and affordable education and housing. Economic
development alone will not ensure this and that is the context in which
economists make comparisons in terms of public spending for certain purposes as
a percentage to GDP.

Today (January 22), Finance Minister Arun Jaitly talking to a channel from Davos was referring to government’s right to plough back surpluses from PSUs for the common good of people. While this will not be disputed, it is also the responsibility of
government to ensure that private sector earns profit only after meeting its
social responsibility.

M
G Warrier, Mumbai