Sandhya Krishnan
India’s middle class first emerged in the early 19th century, when British policies gave rise to a small group of educated, upper caste, English-speaking Indian elite. But the economic potential of the Indian middle class only became a major phenomenon in the 21st century when it started to attract attention for its potential to drive global consumption. India’s contemporary middle class is more multidimensional with economic growth since the 2000s spawning the formation of multiple middle classes — an ‘old’ or established middle class and an emerging ‘new’ middle class.
There is no consensus on the actual size of India’s middle class. Using the classification of those spending between US$2–10 per capita per day, over 600 million people — half of India’s population — were in the middle class in 2012, up from less than 300 million or 27 per cent of the population in 2000. Nearly 75 per cent of the middle class is comprised of the lower middle class — those spending US$2–4 per capita per day, a figure that’s only slightly above the global poverty line.
If using a higher income band — where a person is considered middle class if their daily income is approximately US$17–100 — 432 million Indians can be included in the middle class as of 2021, comprising 31 per cent of the population, up from 14 per cent in 2005.null
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