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India Today
24-04-2025
- Business
- India Today
Middle-class stuck in debt trap, says Marcellus Investment's Saurabh Mukherjea
India's middle class is falling into a dangerous pattern of debt-fuelled consumption, warns Saurabh Mukherjea, founder of Marcellus Investment Managers. The dream of upward mobility is increasingly being financed through easy credit, and the fallout has already data from the Reserve Bank of India, Mukherjea estimates that 5-10% of middle-class households are now stuck in a debt trap. These are not isolated incidents, he says, but symptoms of a larger shift driven by social media-fuelled aspiration, cheap loans, and pandemic-era mindset two years at home during Covid, people were utterly convinced that whatever their financial means are, it doesn't matter—they too can live the good life,' Mukherjea said in a podcast with The Federal. From luxury vacations to designer gadgets and upscale homes, the illusion of affluence is now just an EMI away. Consumption, once tied to income, is being decoupled through credit.'You're told every minute that you should have the lifestyle of an IPL cricketer. You don't have to work for it—you can get it on credit,' Mukherjea pointed this shift is the India Stack—Jandhan, Aadhaar, and Mobile—which has made credit more accessible than ever before. While a success story in financial inclusion, Mukherjea argues it has also removed key friction points that once forced consumers to think twice before allows people to take on a ton of debt almost unthinkingly,' he distress is unfolding in predictable stages. First came defaults in microfinance. Then trouble in the unsecured loan segment. Now, credit card delinquencies are rising, and even two-wheeler financing is under pressure.'Whenever I see credit cards being handed out at airports, the analyst in me starts worrying,' Mukherjea now, home and car loans remain stable, but Mukherjea sees them as the next pressure points if the current cycle continues make matters worse, household savings have dropped to their lowest in 50 years. Middle-class income is being funnelled into loan repayments or risky investments in equities, leaving little safety net. Banks are feeling the strain as well, with deposit growth solution is a bold macroeconomic reset: 'We need the RBI to step in with a 2% rate cut, fresh liquidity, and a 10 to 15 percent devaluation of the rupee. That's the kind of decisive action that could pull us back from the edge.'Until then, the middle class remains locked in a fragile balancing act—living the good life on borrowed time, and borrowed money.
India Today
21-04-2025
- Business
- India Today
'Era of salaryman is over': Saurabh Mukherjea warns India's middle class
The steady paycheck that once defined middle-class life in India is quietly fading. And the country has barely begun to acknowledge 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 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 '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 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 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 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 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 age of the salaryman, as Mukherjea puts it, is over. What replaces him is still being Watch
