  The higher-end tail of the wealth distribution in India is studied using
recently published lists of the wealth of richest Indians between the years
2002-4. The resulting rank distribution seems to imply a power-law tail for the
wealth distribution, with a Pareto exponent between 0.81 and 0.92 (depending on
the year under analysis). This provides a comparison with previous studies of
wealth distribution, which have all been confined to Western advanced
capitalist economies. We conclude with a discussion on the appropriateness of
multiplicative stochastic process as a model for asset accumulation, the
relation between the wealth and income distributions (we estimate the Pareto
exponent for the latter to be around 1.5 for India), as well as possible
sources of error in measuring the Pareto exponent for wealth.
