While nearly half of India considers itself as middle class, that just isn’t correct when global parameters are invoked...

It has been called the great Indian awakening but the discourse about India's burgeoning middle-class, many have suspected, has been in some ways an over-exuberant diversion from the sobering reality that post-Independence India is still a poor or at least far from being a comfortably affluent country. And not just in terms of disparities of wealth distribution which is an empirically proven fact. So, who exactly comprises India’s middle class, anyway? There has been a lot of argument on the definition of who and what constitutes the middle class. Generally, per capita income or daily income is taken into consideration while calculating national income. However, the Pew Research Center defines the middle class as comprising of those earning from two-third to twice the national median income as per household size. According to the Gallup, India ranks quite low on the median per capita income at $616; China’s middle class is three times wealthier than that of India's.

A Pew Research Center study released last week, looked into the break-up of income levels across the world. It studied the changes in income levels across the world's population and pointed out that the first decade of the 2000s saw a historic reduction in global poverty. Despite this change, however, the actual number of people who could be considered as in the middle-income group, remained under 15 per cent. The study claims that more than 90 per cent of India still qualifies as poor or low-income — i.e. the vast majority of India's 1.2 billion citizens. Globally, the equivalent proportion is 71 per cent. As far as middle-income Indians go, only two per cent of the country actually falls into this zone, compared to 13 per cent of the globe. What’s significant is that almost every Indian from, say, an urban professional demographic considers himself/herself to be middle class. That just isn't correct when global parameters are invoked. The study also found that while has been a decline in the poverty rate in India from 35 per cent (2001) to 20 per cent (2011), which corresponds to almost 133 Indians exiting poverty in that decade, poverty’s retreat gave birth to a mushrooming of what could be called the lower middle class rather than a ‘middle class'. The truth is Indians moved from the poor category to a low-income quite rapidly but further progression has been problematic in the main. In The New Middle Class, which was  based on a multi-year collection of data by the Centre for the Advanced Study of India, Devesh Kapur and Milan Vaishnav found that nearly half the Indian population defines itself as middle class. While it is true that the poverty rate has shown a systematic decline in the first decade of the 21st century, the projection of an emerging middle class as defined globally by the Pew Research Centre is anything but a reality.