President Nancy Birdsall was mentioned in a Business Standard article on the Indian middle class.
From the Article
With apologies to an amiable and erudite Prime Minister, I sometimes wonder if economists shouldn’t be bracketed with witch-doctors, numerologists and practitioners of other dubious trades. Indeed, I can understand a sceptical Singaporean’s comment that Indians do so well in global finance because astrology is in our blood.
It’s not just the fatuous Rs 32-a-day controversy I have in mind, though the figures tossed about and the arguments advanced to support facile definitions of poverty expose the limits of punditry and the ivory tower in which many economists luxuriate. I am thinking of the Asian Development Bank’s (ADB’s) glowing report on “the Rise of Asia’s Middle Class”. It predicts that “India’s booming middle class … spurring consumption and innovation” at home will take over from its European and American counterparts as the engine of global growth.
But who are these Indian movers and shakers who hold the future of the world in their wallets? I have always been baffled by both the numbers that are bandied about and how they are arrived at.
We have been hearing of a 300 million-strong middle class for more than 20 years. In 1993, a Singaporean minister, George Yeo, cut it down to 200 million Indians who were “modestly middle class by world standards but impressively comfortable by Indian standards”. I asked Yeo for the basis of the figure and he said he had it from his Indian hosts. What was their source? Then I remembered Mani Shankar Aiyar claiming that the 300-million figure popped out of his head when a Western reporter popped the question. He trotted it out again during last November’s Doha Debate, aggressively telling the British moderator, Tim Sebastian, “That’s approximately five times the size of the population of your country.”
But does India really have this broad group between the working class and upper class that can be called middle class in Weberian socio-economic terms? Don’t the complexities of caste, community, education, lifestyle and perception mean overlapping at both ends and rule out simplistic categorisation? As a child we had a cook called Manmohan Jha from Darbhanga who would have walked out of the house if my mother walked into the kitchen. During the Mithila agitation many years later a Bihar dignitary revived that memory by saying, “Maithilis talk of their glorious past but what were they except cooks in Bengali households?”