Who makes up India’s middle class: a reality check

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 […]