we have the second largest middle class population in the world. and u say it isnt an important market. cheers to u r knowledge of buissness.
Since you're a fan of business knowledge, here's a article from the WSJ.
Much of Indian ‘Middle Class’ Is Almost Poor
India’s middle class—defined as those able to spend between $2 to $20 a day in 2005 purchasing power parity dollars—has expanded to about 420 million, according to an Asian Development Bank report on Asia’s middle class out Thursday.
But compared to China, India has more of its middle class precariously perched just above the poor, a spot from where it is very easy to tumble back into poverty.
These are the people who live on between $2 and $4 a day. That’s about 20 to 40 rupees a day in nominal terms (using an exchange rate of 15.66 rupees to one purchasing power parity dollar) or between 4,700 rupees to 9,400 rupees a month for a family of five.
“Making the middle class stay middle class is very important. In India the majority of the people are still in the lower middle class,” the Asian Development Bank’s chief economist Jong-Wha Lee said as the findings of the report, which looked at Indian data collected between 1993 and 1994 and between 2004 and 2005, were released in Delhi. “These groups are very vulnerable. If they lose their job or if there are major shocks they will go back to poverty.”
The people in the vulnerable lower middle class category number about 244 million, almost 60% of the middle class. India also has approximately 26 million affluent people, those who can spend more than $20 a day.
Figuring out how big the middle class is, is a tricky business. The ADB report notes that by using spending between $2 and $13 a day as the gauge, the World Bank’s Martin Ravallion puts India’s middle class at 264 million. Meanwhile, if you restrict the definition of middle class to the number of people who can spend $10 a day and yet are not in the top 5% of the population by income distribution, economist Nancy Birdsall suggests India would have no middle class at all.
Perhaps one of the most striking charts in the Asian Development Bank report is one that shows the distribution of people in India in absolute numbers by consumption level. What you see is a very bottom-heavy pyramid with a massive base that quickly narrows. Above that massive base, most spending groups seem to have just about doubled in size since the 90s. The affluent appear to have more than doubled. But the size of the base of poor people doesn’t appear to have changed.
China’s “pyramid,” meanwhile is sort of diamond shaped, with less than a 100 million people living on less than $2 a day. More of its population falls in the “mid middle class” category that can spend $5 to $10 a day than into any other category. This group, in absolute numbers, appears to have quadrupled between 1995 and 2007.
While the apparently static block of poor people accounts for a shrinking share of Indians (because of growth in the population) it’s hard not to be discouraged by the fact that even as millions of people have moved into the lower middle class, the absolute number of poor people in India has changed very little.
The report put the number of poor people in India—those living on less than $2 a day—at about 651 million people.
“Population growth has a big impact in India,” said Mr. Lee. “This poor group has much higher fertility and larger household size and that is why you need to constantly focus on moving them to the middle class.”
Much of Indian ‘Middle Class’ Is Almost Poor - India Real Time - WSJ