Yikes, and it’s not like there’s some magic in the free market that “helps” those folks… if anything they’re a market that companies might avoid….
I don’t know what they mean by income data, but let’s use the GDP as a proxy.
2025 GDP (Current USD) - $3.5Tn (actually 2023, but it’s probably still close) Population - 1.45Bn Bottom Half Population - 725mm Bottom Half share - 15% Bottom half share of GDP - $525Bn Bottom half GDP per capita - $725
1990 GDP (current USD) - $320Bn Population - 870mm Bottom Half population - 435mm Bottom Half Share - 22.2% Bottom Half Share of GDP - $71Bn Bottom Half GDP per capita - $163
So the bottom half per capita GDP in current USD has risen from $163 to $725, almost a 4.5x increase.
The increase in inequality is not good, but this isn’t the economic catastrophe for India’s poor that this article is presenting it as. In fact, a 4.5x increase in per capita income in 35 years is a significant achievement for a country of Indias size and diversity. It of course pales in comparison to what China has achieved, but what doesn’t pale in comparison to what China has achieved.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/ind/ind...
The problem with income inequality is that the pie is unlikely to keep growing forever, but your part of it can definitely keep shrinking. The underlying report goes into more detail of the mechanics.
https://marcellus.in/blogs/indias-middle-class-is-losing-gro... (to read it you have to affirm that you're not in the US, since the content could be construed as investment advice - this seems excessively cautious to me, but if you say you are in the US it will boot you to a generic landing page)
The first time I was shown a case study of Amul (cooperative model of food production), it was a really eye opening moment, cause they had reached massive scale, profitable, invested in quality/innovation, really super creative (on the marketing side without any great budget) and most importantly Sustainable.
Like me if you have studied Dominoes, KFC and McDonalds this is not supposed to be possible. It shows how constraints in the local environment lead to innovation and totally different models that work.
Anyone getting thrown into the deep end of the Indian market, equipped with Western models are quickly confronted by assumptions that don't hold, and then they come up with stuff we don't see in the west.
Just look at their Dabbawalas (decentralized supply-chains/logistics), UPI (disintermediating Mastercard and Visa), IPL (no one thought cricket could compete when literally less than 10 countries playing the sport) etc
Western companies built their scalable models by optimizing for capital-heavy, consumption-driven economiess, but that doesn’t mean those models are the only viable ones. India (and other low-consumption economies) often find more sustainable ways to solve the same problems because there’s no safety net of endless VC funding, mass credit, or impulse spending to prop things up. Most Western companies operate in winner-takes-all mode (Amazon crushes small retailers, Uber kills taxis). But Indian models like UPI, Amul, Kirana networks show models of growth in a more cooperative manner.
Imho the world needs more Amuls than McDonalds.