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From aspirational to exhausted: Rethinking India's middle class story

A fragmented, fatigued population can't fuel economic growth the old way

most-populous nation, India population
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Photo: Bloomberg

Rama Bijapurkar

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Around 2007, the late economist Subir Gokarn wrote a landmark article in this paper titled, Middle Class Origins. Almost 20 years later, the postulates of that article are even more relevant — that the origins of the middle class, or the process by which they came to be middle class, mattered and must be factored into our understanding of the middle class and our assumptions of their behaviour and attitudes. That it would be incorrect to assume that India’s future middle class will have the same characteristics as the (then) present middle class in terms of homogeneity and behaviour

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