Who Belongs to India's middle-class anyway? BY Nirmla tai India's Fn M

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitaraman's recent comments about the Indian middle-class has sparked talk about this famed category of people. But just who is a member of indian middle class? Every year before presentation of the Union Budget, talk of the middle-class crops up in clockwork fashion, as Indians start hoping for some help from the finance minister in boosting their disposable income. This year is no different. However, the impetus this time around has come from the government itself after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on January 15 that she identified herself as a member of the middle-class and understood the pressures it faced. But just what is the middle-class in the Indian context? Defining the middle-class If the finance minister of the country counts herself among the middle-class, a good argument can be made that some of the richest Indians too will fall in this category. According to PRS Legislative Research, a Member of Parliament (MP) earns Rs 2.3 lakh per month, inclusive of Constituency and office expense allowance. This amounts to an annual income of Rs 27.6 lakh ― more than 16 times India's per capita income, as per the statistics ministry's first advance estimate for 2022-23. Interestingly, the Centre for Global Development's paper observed that India's middle-class "is crowded into the top decile, along with the much smaller number of 'rich' households". "In that sense, India does not yet look much like the middle-class societies of Latin America, let alone the mature western democracies," the paper added. A similar conclusion was reached by Rama Bijapurkar, Chairperson of PRICE, who said in her 2013 book, 'A Never Before World: Tracking the Evolution of Consumer India', that India's middle-class households are located between the 78th and 98th percentiles by household income ― which really makes them the upper class. It is not surprising then that even seemingly well-off Indians feel they are part of the middle-class.