Who's rich? Who's poor? Who's middle-class?

Hindustan Times

02-05-2025

There's a gated complex in Bengaluru so wealthy, it doesn't even bother with a nameplate on the outside.
The villas here are astronomically priced, relative to the rest of this city. Prices start at ₹30 crore. Because this isn't merely real-estate. It is entry into a parallel India: one that flies private, to the Maldives, for the weekend, and sends children off to Ivy League schools with the nonchalance of a middle-class father asking his son to fetch a carton of milk.
Statistically, this kind of wealth is supremely rare in India. Numerically, there are enough people in this sliver of the economy to outnumber every citizen of Iceland 2-to-1.
That's what we often miss about the Indian economy. Every slice is so vast and varied, that the pie itself is more of a smorgasbord, with most of the meat and cheese heaped up in piles, and much of the board simply bare.
How bare? Let's talk numbers. To make it into India's top 10% of income-earners, one must earn just ₹2.9 lakh a year. To enter the top 1%, ₹20.7 lakh will suffice.
The unnamed gated complex exists as a slice within the 0.1%, where the average annual income stands at about ₹2.25 crore. Even this isn't unicorn startup-exit rich, or Delhi Golf Club rich. That level of elite is tucked away further within the 0.1%, a slice that is itself made up of nearly a million people.
Wealth paints a similar picture. Accumulate ₹21 lakh in net assets, and one is now a 10-percenter. Accumulate ₹82 lakh and one is in the 1%.
That might not even get one a modest flat in a metropolitan suburb, or a high-end SUV, but nationally, you are in rare company. The median adult has accumulated ₹4.3 lakh in assets.
Meanwhile, a significant share owns nearly nothing. Just as millions of the poorest have no formal income at all.
Are you quietly reassessing your place on the spectrum? Are you wondering how we got here?
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I recently posted a selfie with Elon Musk on LinkedIn, with the tongue-in-cheek caption: 'The average net worth in this picture is $200 billion.' The joke being, of course, that Musk's fortune hovers at about $400 billion. But the post was also making another point about averages and how they often mislead.
The thing they say about damned lies and statistics? All numbers have to be viewed as telling only part of a story.
Wealth in India is shadowy and slippery. Many of the truly rich avoid drawing attention, often for good reason: taxes, donation requests or worse. Many others seek to inflate their status to court investors, court power, or elicit envy.
Plenty of not-so-poor Indians find ways to qualify for BPL (Below Poverty Line) cards, gaining access to subsidised rations and other entitlements. In measuring poverty and prosperity, we adhere to dry statistics and World Bank reports. But for all these reasons, they can only tell part of the story. Because measuring haves and have-nots is, by default, an exercise shaped by politics, power, and visibility.
Start with an overarching question: How should one define wealth or poverty? Should it be restricted to income? Assets? Access? Expenditure?
Should we look at households or individuals? Shouldn't urban and rural wealth be calculated differently? How should the ownership of land factor in?
The averages are misleading primarily because they create the illusion of a plane, with different elevations.
The truth is that, particularly in India, the rich and the poor exist on different planets.
The differences aren't just financial. They are atmospheric. Some live behind unmarked gates. Use different sections of our airports. Send their children to certain universities only so they can share a classroom with future presidents and sitting presidents' kids — not for the sake of a name-drop either; but because there is an understanding that these young people will need to know each other, in order to shape the world they will inherit.
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Meanwhile, for millions at the bottom of the pyramid, a single fast-food meal is a dream out of reach. The Tamil film Kaaka Muttai (Crow's Egg; 2015) captured this tenderly.
Two children in a Chennai slum dream of eating a pizza, something they have only seen in advertisements. It's a story of aspiration in a society where desire is cheap, but access is not.
Three years later, in 2018, the Economist ran a piece titled India's Missing Middle Class, cautioning global brands that a billion-strong population doesn't mean a billion eager spenders. Not enough buyers have enough spending power, commercially speaking, it pointed out, to matter to a global company chasing a big pot of gold.
If you're wondering what happened to the boys and their pizza, well, first they were turned away, then they were assaulted and told not to return. Then they were feted and courted, by a pizza shop owner afraid of a public outcry. Then they tasted the pizza and it made them miss their grandmother, recently deceased, who had made them a far better one using dosa batter.
This is how we have always viewed wealth and poverty too. There is merit to being honourably poor, we're told. But, somehow, there isn't quite as much dishonour attached to being obscenely or illicitly wealthy.
It's as much of a mixed bag of ideas as the ways in which we measure affluence itself.
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So what does being 'middle-class' in India really mean?
I have a saying: If your spouse doesn't have to work, you're middle class. If neither of you has to work, you're rich. If your children don't either, you're wealthy.
You're middle-class if you track EMIs and your child's school fees more closely than the Sensex. If you fly economy, buy your iPhone abroad, and Google 'best mid-range air purifiers'. If you obsess over the price of milk but also shop at Zara.
The middle-class is aspirational, stretched, always-reaching.
Everyone thinks they belong to it: the rich who consider themselves 'upper-middle' (is it superstition or guilt that keeps us from acknowledging where we really are on the spectrum?); the ambitious-but-poor, who don't want that label, and believe they will soon transition into the class of people whose greatest concern is where to buy their next smartphone.
Except, that isn't the greatest worry of the middle-class, is it?
Incomes haven't kept pace with lifestyle inflation here, especially in housing, healthcare and education. Liabilities are certain; income increasingly isn't.
The middle-class frets about how long they can afford their home loans and SIPs. They fret about old age, retirement and health insurance.
They certainly feel rich when they go shopping, but as certainly feel niggling worry when the IB school bill arrives.
This is the cycle that keeps the economic engine ticking: Hope. Illusion. Karmic resignation.
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What of those on the margins: the ailing or differently abled, the single parents, those struggling with mental illness or addiction? The truth is, margins don't exist, in this sphere. One either sits within an income class or falls off its sharp edge, into whatever bracket one can now afford.
Perhaps that's another reason the 1%ers and 10%ers do not view themselves as belonging to the upper echelons. Many have no generational wealth to fall back on. Most know they are one bad mishap away from being unable to support their current way of life, whatever it may be; in a country that can currently only help prop up the very poorest.
This is why averages feel good, but mislead. Per capita income in India may suggest steady growth, but the affluence is so unevenly distributed, that most of the country lives not in a state of growing prosperity but a state of precarity instead.
The Indian dream exists – but it is more often powered by hustle, chance and accidents of birth than by a system geared for individual growth.
Aspiration is the one resource we seem to have in infinite supply. We overachieve on ambition. That keeps the hope alive, cycle after cycle.
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Can we fix it? Can economic opportunity be opened up, to more of the country's millions?
India's feudal structure, the generational wealth it engendered and the historical gaps it perpetuated between people of the lower castes and classes, paired with the ravages of colonialism and subsequent decades of sluggish growth, have kept vast swathes of Indian society leashed.
Those at the top of the totem pole retain their grip on the levers of power, or have the means to catch the ear of the powerful.
Maybe, in the end, the real question isn't just where we stand, but who we see when we look around. As Gandhi put it: 'Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man you have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him.'
For policymakers, as well as for the privileged and for anyone making decisions that shape lives, this could be the north star.
Fail to follow it, and our extremes of access and equity will continue to define who we are. Which will continue to hold us back. Because progress isn't only about growth at the top, but dignity and opportunity at every level.
It isn't the Indian dream if only the 10% can dream it.
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