Estimates of India’s middle class are as many as the number of people engaged in this quest. Perhaps this is because of a lack of clarity on what characteristics the ‘middle class’ must have to qualify for the label A FAVOURITE pastime ofIndia’s business analysts and media over the years has been to estimate the size of India’s middle class — a critical indicator of the current and future health of India’s household consumption, and hence India’s economy. Estimates of India’s middle class are as many as the number of people engaged in this quest. Perhaps this is because of lack of clarity on what characteristics the middle class must have in order to qualify for the label, despite all the literature on the subject from scholars around the world. The result is several groupings of heterogeneous households all labelled “middle class”, based on other-country benchmarks or subjective judgments with

IN PART I of this article published on June 13, we showed that India’s genuine middle class is much smaller than is commonly presumed. To realise the country’s economic ambition, a large, expanding, and increasingly prosperous genuine middle class is needed — one that has income stability, resilience, and the ability to grow its income steadily through value-added work. Why is the middle class stunted? We believe that it is both the cause and consequence of the widespread informal sector that is commonly estimated to account for 90% of employment, but generating only a third of the value added in the economy. It is huge with limited efficiency because of its many constraints, and is a low-productivity trap that chokes off the formation ofa genuine middle class in India. Typically, informal workers either work as individual casual labour or in micro enterprises with very small operations, having fewer than 10

Rama Bijapurkar writes: It is this journey that lies behind the blockbuster stock market debut of online beauty products retailer, Nykaa. You could Google in privacy and figure out how to unwrap the power and magic of makeup without being deterred by social judgement. (Illustration: C R Sasikumar) The stupendous stock market debut of India’s online beauty products retailer Nykaa shows, among other things, the enormous investor confidence in the future relationship between Indian women and cosmetics and makeup. Having studied the attitudes to beauty and sexuality of Indian women in pre-liberalisation, pre-internet (almost prehistoric) times, the line that springs to mind is the one from the 1960s Virginia Slims ad: “You’ve come a long way, baby”. In the mid-1980s, the market research agency I worked for was commissioned by Lakmé, the pioneering company that brought makeup to Indian women as early as 1952, supposedly at the instance of Jawaharlal

The fact is that pragmatic consumption remains the hallmark of most of Consumer India’s spending.(AP Photo for Representation) With income growth in the last thirty years and more supply at various price points, and better access to credit, there are a whole class of “have-somes” who are consuming now. The last three decades have brought consumption front and centre into Indian lives, irrespective of age or income. The major life focus of all Indians is to strive to earn more and save more in order to buy a better quality of life for themselves and their family. The tenet that consumption is wasteful and best done in moderation has been replaced by “it’s OK to want it, now let’s see how we can afford it”. What hasn’t changed, though, is belief that the Almighty needs to lend a hand too. The PayTM sign at the Kedarnath temple high up in