Merit should not be a dirty word.

According to Credit Suisse India had 51 dollar billionaires in 2014 compared with 50 in 2011. However, according to the Forbes list India has 90 billionaires in 2015, which puts us in fifth spot, while the Chinese put us third with 97 this year. According to Credit Suisse even though the number of billionaires maybe up the number of millionaires fell by 20,000 from 2011 to 2014 and there was similar drop in all categories. The reason was double digit inflation, a huge rise in taxes, a fall in the rupee and a dramatic fall in growth. Even worse, 61,000 millionaires have shifted overseas to avoid high taxes and for better services. But India is a millionaire nation in one respect. UNICEF estimates that more than 1 million children die of malnutrition every year. On the other hand, with $100 million each, 928 households possess 20% of all the wealth of the nation. The inequality is staggering. However, this figure may drop if real estate prices collapse, as is being predicted. All this is conjecture because most of the wealth of rich Indians is in real estate and, since at least half the price of any property, is paid in cash, or black money, it is impossible to know exactly how many rich people there are. If property prices fall to realistic levels the number of High Networth Individuals will decline sharply but it will be good for the nation as the black money will disappear. Lower real estate costs will enable more people to buy their own properties, save money on rent, which is non-productive expense, and will increase the number of middle class. While the number of middle class rose from 7% in 2001 to 13% in 2011 globally, the number in India rose from 1% to a mere 3%. Around 76.9% of Indians are confined in the low income group and are in risk of poverty should they encounter a heavy drain on their finances in the form of serious illness or injury. Why is it that Indians are the highest earning ethnic community in the US, earning more than the Chinese, while in terms of nations China's economy is 5 times that of ours? The reason is our bureaucracy which is an inheritance from the British Indian Civil Service and still functions as a colonial straitjacket. They come out with arbitrary tax demands, ignore court orders with impunity and seem to have politicians under their control. They infest every aspect of our lives, from sports to education, growing rich while standards deteriorate. They want to take away the independence of the Reserve Bank and set up a committee of pen pushers to decide monetary policy. No wonder Raghuram Rajan mourned that India has lost a generation of economists. Can you have wealth with a bunch of useless people deciding policy?