The world inequality report 2026, released on December 10 by the Paris-based World Inequality Lab headed by celebrated economist Thomas Piketty, identifies India among the world’s most inegalitarian countries in which one percent of the population owns 40 percent of national wealth, and the top 10 percent of earners corner 58 percent of national income. The annual report has revived a familiar tirade within Left-liberal academics and media pundits targeting the handful of globally competitive businessmen as crony capitalists.

In retrospect, it’s clear that the greatest failure of the Nehruvian socialist development model was neglect of public education, which to this day remains inadequately funded and administered. Almost six decades after the Kothari Commission (1967) recommended that the Central and state governments should allocate at least 6 percent of GDP to education, national spending on public education has been stuck in the 3-4 percent groove. The country’s 1.1 million government schools are characterized by teacher absenteeism, rote learning, broken infrastructure and rock bottom student learning outcomes.

According to the Annual Status of Education Report 2024, published by the highly respected, independent Pratham Education Foundation, which field-tested 649,491 rural students in the 3-16 age group, 51 percent of class V children cannot read class II texts and 69 percent of class V pupils can’t solve simple division sums. Neglect of foundational primary-secondary education has been compounded by chronic under-investment in skills education and training. Only 5 percent of India’s workforce has formal skills training qualifications as against China’s 26 percent, USA’s 50 percent and South Korea’s 96 percent.

As a result, millions of youth enter adulthood functionally uneducated and unemployable, and condemned to low-productivity informal work. Their stagnant wages and precarious livelihoods then show up in global income inequality charts. No amount of post-hoc wealth redistribution can compensate for the denial of human resource development during childhood. It’s now well established that high-quality primary-secondary and skills education drives economic growth far more effectively than subsidies — it’s better to teach people to fish than to give them fish. In the neighbouring People’s Republic of China, which ab initio invested in foundational public primary-secondary education, the per capita income is $13,800 against India’s $2,132.

At bottom, The World Inequality Report 2026 is an indictment of successive governments’ failure to invest in developing human capital. Regrettably, despite a mountain of evidence, there seems to be minimal awareness within the self-serving establishment that quality education is the greatest equaliser and passport to upward socio-economic mobility of the bottom 90 percent.