ABSTRACT
Why is the question of the ‘right to rights’ raised in India, one of the world’s largest democracies? It has been observed that, with the growth in the economy following the reforms of the 1990s, the rights of underprivileged people are being eroded. Another outcome of economic growth is that inequality between rich and poor has increased. In the 1990s and 2000s, the wealthiest 10 per cent of the population held at least 50 per cent of total assets while the least wealthy 10 per cent held at most 0.4 per cent of total assets and 0.2 per cent of net worth (Jayadev et al. 2007, quoted in Weisskopf 2011). India witnessed widening income inequality during the postreform economic growth period 1993 to 2005. Further, despite the doubling of per capita consumption in the postreform decade, the decline in poverty lessened compared to the prereform decade. The prereform period witnessed a decline in poverty by 8.4 per cent and in the postreform period poverty declined by 6.7 per cent (Sarkar and Mehta 2010). When almost one third of the country’s population lives below the poverty level there is something seriously wrong with the distribution of the benefits of growth ‒ hence the question of rights strongly surfaces in a democracy like India. Some economists, however, would like to believe that increasing inequality is a necessary concomitant of economic growth (Weisskopf 2011).
