In 2025, India’s top 10% captured 58% of national income. The top 1% took 22.6%. The bottom 50% received 15%. In terms of wealth – not income – the numbers are starker: the top 10% own 65% of national wealth, with the top 1% controlling 40% of it. By these metrics, India is not merely a country with inequality. It is one of the world’s most unequal major economies.
This was the opening frame of the Economics and Finance session at VLF – Vadodara Literature Festival 4.0 on January 27, 2026 – not a celebration of growth, but an honest accounting of what growth, in its current form, is producing. The three speakers who took the stage at Vivekananda’s Vedanta Bhavan were not there to be gloomy. They were there to be clear.
Pradeep S. Mehta, founder and Secretary General of CUTS International and co-editor of Economic Diplomacy: India’s Ascendancy in the 21st Century, has spent decades working on the intersection of trade, competition policy, and consumer rights. Devina Mehra, founder of First Global and author of Money, Myths and Mantras: The Ultimate Investment Guide, brings 30 years of empirical finance practice to questions that most investing literature treats as simpler than they are. Nitin Seth, CEO of Incedo Inc. and author of Human Edge in the AI Age, works at the intersection of technology, leadership, and the question of what human capacities will matter most in an economy increasingly shaped by AI.
The Inequality Problem: Growth Without Distribution
The session opened with a question that Mehta had spent his career examining: as India’s GDP grows – projected at 6-7% annually, currently outpacing China’s approximately 4-5% – who is actually experiencing that growth?
The data he cited from the World Inequality Report 2026 was stark. India’s inequality has deepened faster than China’s equivalent growth period. The gains from economic expansion are concentrated at the top, while the structural barriers that prevent economic mobility – quality of education, healthcare access, infrastructure in rural areas, credit availability for small enterprises – remain largely unchanged.
He introduced the concept of ‘Har Ghar Vyapar’ – Business in Every Home – as both a policy aspiration and a practical response to AI-driven employment disruption. If automation is projected to displace 35-50% of current employment categories over the next decade, the answer cannot simply be retraining. It requires restructuring the relationship between households and economic production: enabling families to build micro-enterprises, to participate in digital commerce through platforms like ONDC, to create resilient income streams that are not dependent on a single employer’s decisions.
The argument was not anti-corporation or anti-technology. It was a structural observation: in an economy where both jobs and wealth are concentrating, the most durable response for most Indians is to build something of their own, however small.
Key economic insights from Pradeep S. Mehta:
- India’s top 10% income share is among the highest in major economies – growth without distribution is not development
- ‘Har Ghar Vyapar’ as a structural response to AI displacement: build household enterprises now
- Three ‘Ts’ of economic diplomacy: Trade, Tourism, tax – measure embassy effectiveness by these
- Atmanirbharta (self-reliance) and global engagement are complementary, not contradictory
Devina Mehra: The Myths That Destroy Wealth – and the Truths That Build It
Devina Mehra’s contribution to the session was the most practically useful for the students in the audience – and the most willing to challenge the financial content they encounter daily on social media.
Her book, Money, Myths and Mantras: The Ultimate Investment Guide, is built around a deceptively simple premise: most of what people believe about investing is wrong, and the source of their wrongness is usually not stupidity but bad information delivered confidently. The myths she debunked range from the reasonable-sounding (follow Warren Buffett’s strategy) to the demonstrably dangerous (social media crypto tips).
On the ‘following gurus’ myth: the specific strategies that made Warren Buffett wealthy were developed in a specific market environment, at a specific scale, over a specific time horizon. Applying them to an Indian retail investor in 2026 requires understanding what the strategy actually is and why it works, not just copying the positions.
On crypto and social media investment culture: approximately 95% of people who trade actively lose money. The 2 crore young crypto users in India (mostly 18-35) are engaging in a space where social media ‘influencers’ are frequently paid to promote specific assets – a dynamic that creates systematic misinformation around products with 30% tax structures and extreme volatility.
Her recommended investment principles were deliberately unsexy:
- Asset allocation is the only reliable long-term strategy – not stock picking, not market timing
- Global diversification prevents the single-country/asset risk that destroys Indian portfolios in downturns
- Start with SIPs in index funds before any other investment product
- Invest early and small – the habit matters more than the amount
- First salary: begin fixed deposits or gold/silver before considering equities
- 95% of active traders lose money – this is not a motivation issue, it is a structural one
Nitin Seth: The Human Edge When AI Is Rewriting the Rules
Nitin Seth’s contribution to the session addressed the question that creates the most anxiety among students across every discipline: what happens to careers when AI can do what we were trained to do?
His framework, developed in Human Edge in the AI Age, begins with a productive reframe: the question is not what AI can replace but what it cannot – and how to develop those capacities deliberately. His answer is the POSSIBLE framework: Problem-Solving, Openness to Change, Spirituality, Sportsmanship, Impact, Balance, Leadership, Entrepreneurship.
These are not skills that can be automated. They are the qualities that allow human beings to navigate the boundaries of what any technology can do – to identify where the algorithm fails, to ask the question the model wasn’t trained to answer, to make the ethical judgment the system cannot make.
His career – McKinsey, Flipkart as COO, then Incedo – gave him a direct view of how AI is reshaping the organisations that employ the most educated people in India. The pattern he observed is not primarily about replacement. It is about transformation: the jobs that survive AI integration are the ones that use AI as a tool rather than resisting it or being consumed by it.
Seth’s advice for students navigating the AI transition:
- Develop the POSSIBLE framework capacities – these are what distinguish human contribution from algorithmic output
- Use AI actively – the risk is not using AI, it is being used by it
- Upskill in irreplaceable human edges: creativity, empathy, ethical judgment
- Block time weekly for Coursera-style deep skills that complement, not duplicate, AI capability
- Audit your career quarterly: if your role is >50% automatable, build adjacent skills now
The Social Media Trap: What the Panel Said That Was Most Urgent
The session’s most practically urgent passage came when all three speakers converged on a single theme: the dangerous gap between financial content available to young Indians on social media and the financial literacy required to evaluate it.
The pattern is well-documented but rarely addressed as directly as the VLF – Vadodara Literature Festival 4.0 panel did. Social media platforms host financial content creators who are, in many cases, paid to promote specific assets or products. The disclosure requirements are minimal and frequently not met. The content itself – designed for engagement rather than accuracy – mimics the confidence and accessibility of genuine financial education while providing advice that is often actively harmful.
The panel’s unified message for the students in the audience was not ‘stay off social media.’ It was: verify everything through RBI and SEBI sites before acting on any financial claim. Never invest in anything you have spent fewer than six months researching. Prioritise learning over following.
Closing thought from the session – distilled from all three speakers:
- Biggest risk is not taking risk – but uninformed risk is not courage, it’s recklessness
- Be a learning machine: the economy will change faster than any degree prepares you for
- Use AI to learn new things; never be completely dependent on it
- Youth is India’s demographic advantage – but only if that youth is financially, technologically, and humanly literate
- TTT: Trade, Tourism, and Tax – Mehta’s framework for India’s global economic strategy.
