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Comment by wrongc0ntinent | Hacker News Reader

You cannot figure out the "servant" business in India without considering the caste system. We get the income inequality side pretty well, it makes sense. But until the caste crap gets replaced by a different currency, being/having a servant is a different concept from a westerner's.

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India doesn't have much income inequality. Their Gini is 33, same ballpark as France, Bangladesh and the UK. (For comparison, Denmark is at 25 and the US is at 45.)

> India doesn't have much income inequality

This[1] page shows India's Gini coefficient at 36.8 in 2004. India suffers from very high income inequality

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

33 by the World Bank, 36.8 by the CIA. Using the CIA's numbers rather than the world Bank, India is comparable to New Zealand or Japan. It's still well below the US (45) or the world as a whole (39).

India's problem is poverty, not inequality. Much as first world hipsters try to conflate the two, they are not the same thing.

>India's problem is poverty, not inequality.

I would agree, but life in a city like Kolkata is very different from a place like tribal Odisha. Sheer numbers (as opposed to percentages) are more important when you get in the hundreds of millions.

Thanks for that info, like many people I had always assumed that India was especially unequal, and this was the cause of many of its social problems. The more you know...

Bear in mind that "income" is a loose concept in India. A lot of the economy is 'under the table'. So while someone may report an "income" of $1000/month, their actual take may be 10x or more. Most Indians outside the salaried sector don't pay income taxes. And there are tax loopholes (agricultural income comes to mind) which allow people to shield massive amounts of income.

And? Unless that means it's all unicorns and rainbows out there I can't see your point.

the "caste crap" has increasingly less to do with people being "servants" - its more an income and education thing. In fact - being from a "lower caste" in India - actually makes getting into the IITs (best engg. colleges) & IIMs ( best management colleges) and pretty much everywhere else a cake walk due to flawed affirmative action programs.

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