'Era of salaryman is over': Saurabh Mukherjea warns India's middle class

India Today

21-04-2025

The steady paycheck that once defined middle-class life in India is quietly fading. And the country has barely begun to acknowledge it.Saurabh Mukherjea, founder and chief investment officer at Marcellus Investment Managers, believes India is now entering a new economic era—one that no longer guarantees stability for the educated, hard-working urban Indian.Speaking on a recent podcast titled Beyond the Paycheck: India's Entrepreneurial Rebirth, Mukherjea issued a clear and unsettling warning: salaried employment, long considered the golden path to financial security, is dying.advertisement
'The defining flavour of this decade will be the death of salaried employment as a worthwhile avenue for educated, determined, hardworking people,' he said. His statement is backed by data and driven by the visible disruption happening across India's white-collar economy. With AI advancing rapidly, many of the roles that once demanded armies of office workers are now being done by algorithms.Companies across sectors—tech, finance, media—are quietly downsizing the very foundation of the middle-class job market. 'Much of what was supposed to be done by white-collar workers is now done by AI,' Mukherjea pointed out. 'Google says a third of its coding is already done by AI. The same is coming for Indian IT, media, and finance.'Even middle management—the traditional career stronghold for many—offers no real security anymore. The long, loyal careers that once earned promotions, pensions, and prestige are increasingly obsolete. 'The old model where our parents worked 30 years for one organisation is dying,' Mukherjea said. 'The job construct that built India's middle class is no longer sustainable.'advertisementFor millions of Indians who grew up believing in the promise of the corporate ladder, this shift will be hard to accept. The ground is moving beneath their feet—and fast. But Mukherjea isn't offering doom and gloom. He sees this rupture as the beginning of something more hopeful: a transition from paycheck-chasing to purpose-building.India's vast digital infrastructure, developed over the last decade, has quietly laid the foundation for a new kind of economic activity—one rooted in entrepreneurship. The JAM Trinity—Jandhan bank accounts, Aadhaar identification, and widespread mobile connectivity—has, for the first time, equipped a large portion of the population with the basic tools needed to build businesses. 'If applied with the same intellect and grit we brought to corporate careers, entrepreneurship can be the new engine of prosperity,' Mukherjea said.But this shift requires more than access to tools—it demands a cultural overhaul. And that might be the bigger challenge. 'We're a money-obsessed society,' he said. 'We define success by paychecks. That has to change.' India's fixation with monthly income and social status through employment is, in his view, holding back the country's next wave of builders. Parents still push their children toward job stability, even as that very stability becomes a myth.advertisement'Families like yours and mine must stop preparing kids to be job-seekers. The jobs won't be there,' he said. It's a hard truth, but perhaps a liberating one too. In Mukherjea's vision, the future belongs not to those who wait for hiring managers to call—but to those willing to take risks, experiment, and build from scratch.The age of the salaryman, as Mukherjea puts it, is over. What replaces him is still being written.Must Watch