The situation in India is irreversible.. People tend to get deluded by India's reserve etc etc but the situation is so dire that elite has given up on it.. India is a case of extremes you have a small tiny group that is 00.1% holding about 85% of wealth with 15% to the remaining.
95% of the country lives below the bread-line world's largest poverty. It is irreversible
Heck the poverty is so great in India that the socalled middle class in India is actully the poor.
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India’s middle class is actually the world’s poor
Virtually the entire discussion among economists on defining the middle class in “emerging economies” pertains to levels of consumption expenditure or income. No doubt, income is a relevant indicator, but not when taken in isolation.
None of them attempt to base the definition on the concerned section’s relation to the means of production, and its place in the social organisation of labour
. Thus, we are left with a motley conglomeration of people linked only by (very broad) income group, but with little else to connect them in social terms.
The problem with such a definition is that it gives us very little useful information about the nature of the society.
These studies acknowledge that there is no generally accepted definition of the middle class. So each sets about devising its own definition. Broadly, they adopt one of two methods. A few define the middle class in relative terms—a class standing midway between the top and the bottom; most define it in absolute terms—as possessing a particular standard of living, as measured by income or wealth.
To define the middle class in relative terms, i.e., in relation to the rich and the poor, we start with the median consumption level. (If the population were arranged according to their level of consumption, from the highest to the lowest, the “median” would be the person in the middle, with an equal number of persons on either side.)
From the Government’s National Sample Surveys (NSS) of consumption, one can locate the median consumption level. A
World Bank study did just this to arrive at what it called India’s “middle class.” Its startling finding was, in the bank’s words, that, “India’s middle class lives barely or not far above India’s poverty line, and below international poverty lines, especially in the rural areas.”
A large number of officially “non-poor” people in India are clustered just above the official poverty line, so that even a small increase in the poverty line
adds large numbers to the figure of the poor.
Moreover, as the
World Bank noted (pdf), not only did people move out of poverty during any given period, but others also moved back into it, for various reasons such as illness. A large section of those officially deemed “non-poor” belonged to the same social group as the officially poor.
If we were to define India’s “middle class” in relative terms, it would be difficult to separate it from the poor.
Using the IHDS 2005, Reeve Vanneman and Amaresh Dubey
defined middle-income households (pdf) in relative terms, as those whose income is above half and below twice the all-India median. Their data place the median per capita income for 2004 at Rs5,708, or Rs15.64 per day. This is lower than the lower of the World Bank’s two international poverty lines. Three-fourths of the population would fall under the higher of the two World Bank lines.
Vanneman and Dubey define individuals in households below half the median as poor, and those in households with income higher than twice the median as affluent. By this definition, the middle income group consist of the middle 60% of households, because 18% of individuals are in households with less than half the median income (i.e., are defined as “relatively poor”) and 22% are in households with more than twice the median income (i.e., are defined as “relatively affluent”).
It is difficult to separate India’s "middle class" from its poor.
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