SUM AND SUBSTANCE | India’s Middle Class is the Biggest Loser of 2024
1 week, 5 days ago

SUM AND SUBSTANCE | India’s Middle Class is the Biggest Loser of 2024

The Hindu  

Published : Dec 27, 2024 21:01 IST - 7 MINS READ In a year of “yes, no, maybe” both the Reserve Bank and the Finance Ministry now agree that the country has a growth problem. Consumer goods companies could swap notes with India’s automobile manufacturers, where 2024 has been clearly disappointing in terms of sales for entry-level passenger vehicles and for larger commercial vehicles. This soggy demand environment showed up in India’s most recent growth numbers where we saw a seven-quarter slump of 5.4 per cent, well below the Reserve Bank’s estimates. Fed on a healthy diet of religious fervour and nationalism on the one hand and small-sized cash schemes on the other, India’s middle class has chosen what it sees as a stable, yet economically ineffective government. The year 2024 also closes with the loss of one of India’s greatest economic thinkers and political leaders, the former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh: the man who implemented that visionary rural employment scheme and the man who ushered in liberalisation and transformed how India’s middle class consumed goods and services.

Middle Class 2024 State Middle Class Cent Sum Households Rural India Biggest Loser  jobs  substance  class  growth  sum  2024  middle  rural  india  indias  biggest  loser  cent  households

History of this topic

Budget 2025: Top 6 expectations from the middle class
1 week, 2 days ago

Budget 2025: Top 6 expectations from the middle class

India Today  

As the Union Budget 2025 draws near, the hopes of India’s middle class, particularly salaried individuals, are soaring. Enhanced support for retirement savings, education funds, and healthcare investments could help families secure their future while reducing their tax liability. INCREASED SAVINGS OPPORTUNITIES The middle class dreams of better avenues for savings, including policies that encourage investments in retirement funds, education, …

Manmohan Singh — a hero of Indian middle class
1 week, 5 days ago

Manmohan Singh — a hero of Indian middle class

The Hindu  

Former prime minister Manmohan Singh, who passed away on December 26, has largely contributed to the expansion of the size of the Indian middle class. Live updates: Manmohan Singh’s mortal remains will be taken to Congress headquarters Since the early 1990s, the middle class became supportive of the new economic policies as they brought tangible economic benefits to them in …

YouTube journalist Ravish Kumar goes on an unhinged rant against Middle Class Indians
2 months ago

YouTube journalist Ravish Kumar goes on an unhinged rant against Middle Class Indians

Op India  

YouTube journalist Ravish Kumar has gone on a bizarre unhinged rant against Middle Class Indians accusing them for everything under the sun, from communalism to not protesting against the government to illegally entering USA to theft of GST to drugs consumption to even intellectual bankruptcy. Regarding rise of cyber crimes like ‘Digital Arrest’, Ravish Kumar said that middle class loses …

The Illusion of Middle Class: Why People Identify as Rich, Even When They're Not
2 months, 2 weeks ago

The Illusion of Middle Class: Why People Identify as Rich, Even When They're Not

Live Mint  

The article explores why a significant number of people in India identify as middle-class, despite the varying income levels and statistical readings. One reason is that people are not aware of the country's big picture and may underestimate their position based on their income. Additionally, the concept of being rich is not universally defined, leading to discrepancies in self-identification. The …

Anant Ambani’s glitzy wedding highlights India’s ‘missing middle class’
5 months, 2 weeks ago

Anant Ambani’s glitzy wedding highlights India’s ‘missing middle class’

Al Jazeera  

India’s middle class is much poorer than China’s after decades of strong growth despite starting at a similar base. Compared with fellow rising economy China, India’s consumers have far less spending power, with the country’s middle class heavily concentrated at the lower end of the income spectrum, according to a report released by Oxford Economics in May. “One of the …

India’s middle class and the ‘Modi factor’
7 months, 1 week ago

India’s middle class and the ‘Modi factor’

The Hindu  

Narendra Modi’s appeal to the middle class is a case study in political communication, as his style of populism does not neatly fit any typical framework long studied by academics. The encoder of the political message — in this case Mr. Modi and the BJP — took advantage of the middle class’s willingness to ignore the obvious consequences of its …

Year Ender 2023: Financial Health Check, How Indian Middle Class Redefined Spending
1 year ago

Year Ender 2023: Financial Health Check, How Indian Middle Class Redefined Spending

News 18  

As 2023 draws to a close, it’s a good time to assess the financial health of India’s middle class, a critical segment driving the country’s economy. S. Ravi, former BSE chairman and promoter and managing partner, Ravi Rajan & Co., underlined various aspects of the lives of the Indian middle class and how they redefined finance this year. The financial …

Rajdeep Sardesai rants against middle class, calls them communal
1 year, 5 months ago

Rajdeep Sardesai rants against middle class, calls them communal

Op India  

India Today journalist Rajdeep Sardesai today ranted against the Indian middle class and scientific community, labelling them the most communal sections of the society. How Rajdeep Sardesai’s comments don’t hold water Calling the whole middle class ‘selfish’ and ‘communal’ feeds the liberal narrative that Hindus have grown communally charged after the Ram Mandir movement. Rajdeep Sardesai’s disdain for the middle …

India’s Class Structure a ‘McMaharaja’: Sociology of the ‘Sandwiched Middle Class’ - News18
1 year, 9 months ago

India’s Class Structure a ‘McMaharaja’: Sociology of the ‘Sandwiched Middle Class’ - News18

News 18  

For something to be judged as ‘upper’ or ‘lower’, something must inevitably be the ‘middle’, to serve as a baseline for comparison. Our understanding of ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ as social spaces at the two very ends, facilitates a conceptual need for an intermediary middle class, a location desirable to most. The middle class is characterised by white-collar occupations, and this …

How Reserve Bank of India Gets Trumped By ‘Irrational’ Choices of Middle Class
2 years, 1 month ago

How Reserve Bank of India Gets Trumped By ‘Irrational’ Choices of Middle Class

The Quint  

From manufacturing slowdown—which is now beginning to improve—and exchange rate disparity to an imperfect-rational middle class, there are many issues that ail the Reserve Bank of India’s monetary policy framework but for the paucity of space, let us analyse one: The middle class. The liberalisation-privatisation-globalisation-LPG policy in the 1990s led to the creation of an entirely new economic middle class …

DC Edit | Make middle class growth engine in coming Budget
2 years, 1 month ago

DC Edit | Make middle class growth engine in coming Budget

Deccan Chronicle  

Discussions on what should be in the next Union Budget are now taking place between policymakers, finance ministry officials, economists, experts and several interest groups, ranging from industry bodies to those in specific domains. The middle classes are not seen as too crucial and are all but forgotten except when it comes to two aspects — changes in income-tax slabs …

Pavan K. Varma | What’s on the mind of the Great Indian Middle Class?
2 years, 6 months ago

Pavan K. Varma | What’s on the mind of the Great Indian Middle Class?

Deccan Chronicle  

In 1997, I wrote a book called The Great Indian Middle Class, which was brilliantly translated into Hindi by Abhay Dubey, with the title Bharatiya Madhya Varg Ki Ajeeb Dastaan. Today, the Indian middle class must rank as one of the most aspirational classes in the world. A foreigner once told me that he was surprised how an educated middle …

Pandemic pushed over 3 crore Indians out of middle class: Pew Research
3 years, 9 months ago

Pandemic pushed over 3 crore Indians out of middle class: Pew Research

India Today  

A recent research report has revealed that the novel coronavirus pandemic last year pushed approximately 3.2 crore Indians out of the middle class. The report prepared by the US-based Pew Research Center showed that the number of Indians in the middle class — those who earn between $10 to $20 per day — shrunk by roughly 3.2 crores. Read | …

Arun Jaitley says extreme poverty falling, to end by 2031
5 years, 8 months ago

Arun Jaitley says extreme poverty falling, to end by 2031

Live Mint  

New Delhi: India's finance minister said on Monday fast economic growth and rapid urbanisation would slash the number of people in extreme poverty by 2021 and end it completely in the decade after that. The economy is a major issue in a staggered general election that began on Thursday and will end on 19 May, with the main opposition Congress …

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