Surveys revealed that the Very Rich comprise about six million people or a million households. Below them, the middle class consists of three segments: The Consuming Class accounting for thirty mission households or 150 million people, the bulk of whom could be in the market for all kinds of consumer durable; the Climbers, consisting of fifty million households or 275 million people; and the Aspirants numbering another 275 million.
The policy of economic liberalization provided the Indian middle class an excuse to even more blatantly separate its ‘world’ from the vast masses of the destitute and deprived in India. It deadened even further any remaining sense of concern in it for the disadvantaged. It gave a flamboyant ideological justification for the creation of two Indias, one aspiring to be globalized, and the other hopelessly, despairingly marginalized. One unfortunate aspect of this general atmosphere of hope and optimism was that it pushed even more into the background some rather inconvenient messages about the real condition of the Indian economy.
We should not forget that…
• Every day as many as 250 million Indians are still going to bed hungry.
• Every third human being in the world without safe and adequate water supply
is an Indian.
• Diarrhea still claims close to 1.5 million infants each year in this country – one every three minutes.
• Fifty-three percent of all Indian children below the age of five are underweight and malnourished (as against Ethiopia’s forty-eight percent).
• Infant mortality rate in India is one of the highest in the world.
• Rural female illiteracy in the country is close to seventy percent.
• Only fifteen percent of the scheduled caste women in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the two most populous states in the country, are literate.
• More than half of all Indians living in cities have no access to sanitation facilities, and the absence of such a basic facility is as high as a staggering ninety-seven percent for rural Indians.
• Statistics can hardly convey the pulverizing, degrading poverty of the thirty-nine percent of Indians who, as per the government’s own admission, live below the poverty line. [Pages 182-183]
* Excerpted from: Pavan K. Varma, The Great Indian Middle Class, 1998, (© Penguin Books India, Kolkata, Pages 171, 180, 182-183.)
Equip, Evangelize, Establish
Dani Abraham, National Equipping Director
