I'm middle class (or may be not)

The facts about the distribution of Income and Indian middle class. The population pyramid is way more skewed than we think.

“I have grown up in a middle-class household in India.”

You would have used this phrase to describe yourself in those tell-me-about-yourself questions. 

Pop culture, movies, and TV shows have built a stereotype of several middle-class traits. A small two-bedroom house, a scooter, emphasis on education, just enough money for needs, and summer vacation trips to native villages - our personification of the middle class. 

However, data about the middle class in India is hard to digest.

The table shows income distribution by assuming the average household size of 4 (for a more straightforward calculation) and an average per capita income of 2300 USD per annum. 

So who’s ‘really’ the middle class?

Technically, the middle class is somewhere between the 30th and 60th percentile—roughly speaking, the middle third of the population.

So, for the middle class, the average monthly income per household is around 30000. 

As per the latest central government salaries,  Most of the administrative staff (the babus in offices) in level 3 or 4 have a base pay of more than 30000, which means that if you are in a stable job and even if you are the sole earning member of the house, still then you are most probably in the top 30% of the country.

But we hardly ever realise that.

And a significant reason for that is the echo chambers we have grown in. Although we are a free country without any mandated segregation or discrimination, we structurally put ourselves into “walled gardens” of people like us.

Schools we go to have people like us, almost everyone coming from economically sufficient households and referring to themselves as middle class. Our higher education also curates from this group and eventually feeds into the workforce. The housing societies we stay in have people like us. So over a certain period - we end up “factualising” it. 

The middle class are the ones who are in front of our eyes yet invisible to us - our house helps, the cab drivers who ferry us to offices, the neighbourhood ‘paan shop’ owner.

If you are reading this, there is a high chance that you would be economically among India's top decile (10%). Let that sink in.