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 40,000 rupees per month at the turn of the millennium. In today’s prices, that is roughly 1.7 lakh rupees.
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. As money poured into the capital markets, companies raised funds to pay top dollar to attract the best available talent. By the end of this bubble period, it was common for white-collar professionals in senior management positions to earn 30-50 lakh rupees per year.
Those at the top had already crossed crore-plus packages. Then came the Global Financial Crisis. And the world economy came to a grinding halt.
Stock markets crashed and easy money dried up. Also Read Job Creation Seems Better Than.