Why India's Middle Class is Speaking Up Again
Opinion | "Today, young people cannot afford to get married and have kids. They cannot hope to own homes," writes Aunindyo Chakravarty.
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India’s ‘middle’ class – if one can call those between the 95th and 99th percentile by that name – is back at the centre of all after-dinner debates. It is deeply disgruntled, if not downright angry.
To understand why, allow me to rewind to the year 2000.
Back then, I was two years into my first regular job. I had been a late entrant to the job market, having spent a few years in academia dabbling in research. So, when I began working, I got a bit of a ‘seniority bump’ in my starting salary. That is probably the reason, my ‘cost-to-company’ was about Rs 40,000 per month at the turn of the millennium. In today’s prices, that is roughly Rs 1.7 lakh.
Mind you, I was just a journalist, who had no revenue or profit targets to meet. My friends who were in proper corporate jobs, with proper corporate deliverables, were getting paid almost twice as much as I was.
This was just the beginning. Things exploded after the stock market boom of 2004-05, peaking in 2007-08.
Read the full opinion piece HERE.
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