NCAER Seminar A Tale of Two Middle Classes

NCAER organised a seminar featuring a presentation by Dr Sonalde Desai, Professor and Centre Director, NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre, New Delhi, and Distinguished University Professor Emerita, Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, titled, ‘A Tale of Two Middle Classes’, on 31 August 2026. Dr Desai’s presentation examined the size, composition, and orientation of India’s middle classes, and the divergence between objective and subjective perceptions about the latter. Her presentation drew upon research from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), which began in 2004-05 as a nationally representative, multi-topic survey of 41,554 households in 1,503 villages and 971 urban neighbourhoods across India, conducted by NCAER in collaboration with the University of Maryland. The second round of the survey re-interviewed most of these households in 2011-12. The third round, for which fieldwork was undertaken in 2022-24, has been jointly conducted by researchers from NCAER, the University of Maryland, Indiana University, and University of Michigan. IHDS has documented the unprecedented transformation of Indian society across two decades with the growth of the middle class as a key component of this transformation.

Dr Desai’s presentation addressed the following pivotal questions:

1. What is the size of the Indian middle class, and who forms a part of it?
2. To what extent do the objective and subjective markers of middle-class status overlap?
3. How do the middle-class lifestyle and worldview differ from those of the poor and the near-poor?

The comprehensiveness of the IHDS dataset fosters informed, cross-disciplinary discussion at a time when the scarcity of empirical evidence often constrains researchers and practitioners from engaging with these questions.

The seminar was chaired by Mr Suresh Goyal, Director General, NCAER. Dr Amita Baviskar, Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University, and Mr Aurélien Kruse, Lead Economist for India at The World Bank, served as discussants during the seminar.