For decades, India’s economic story has been told through the lens of scale: a billion-plus population, a fast-growing middle class, a market too large for global companies to ignore even when returns were modest. A recent report projecting that India will overtake China by 2036 in the number of consumers spending more than $90 a day marks a subtle but significant shift in that narrative. This is no longer simply a story about size. It is a story about spending power, and it demands a different kind of national conversation than the one India has been having about its own growth.
The numbers themselves are striking. India’s affluent consumer base, currently estimated at 2.6 crore people, is projected to nearly quadruple to 10.8 crore by 2036, edging past China’s estimated 10.3 crore in the same category. This would represent the single largest increase among all markets tracked in the report, a rate of expansion no other major economy is expected to match. For a country that has long been characterised by mass-market, price-sensitive consumption, this projected surge in high-spending consumers signals the emergence of a genuinely new demographic: Indians whose consumption patterns will begin to resemble those of the developed world.
Multinational companies have already begun recalibrating their India strategies in anticipation. As China’s consumer growth slows and its economy matures, India is increasingly positioned as the next frontier for premium goods, services, travel and lifestyle spending. This is a welcome vote of confidence, but it should not be mistaken for evidence that India’s broader economic challenges have been resolved. Affluence at the top of the pyramid and precarity in the middle and bottom can, and often do, coexist within the same economy. India’s own labour market data shows a persistent gap between headline growth and quality employment, a gap this newspaper has examined before. The rise of an affluent consumer class does not by itself indicate that this gap is closing.
What the projection does reveal is the growing bifurcation within India’s consumer economy. On one end, a expanding cohort of high earners, concentrated in urban centres and driven by technology, finance and professional services, will increasingly demand premium products, international travel and sophisticated financial services. On the other end, a much larger base of core and aspirational consumers will continue to drive volume-led growth in essentials, value retail and mass-market goods. Companies that read this data correctly will not treat it as a signal to abandon mass-market strategies in favour of premiumisation alone; they will recognise that India’s consumption story, for the foreseeable future, will require serving both ends of this spectrum simultaneously.
There is also a policy dimension worth considering. A rising affluent class generates disproportionate tax revenue, drives investment in higher education, healthcare and real estate, and often becomes a vocal constituency shaping economic policy discourse. If India’s growth continues to concentrate gains among a relatively narrow, if expanding, segment of high spenders, the political economy of the country could shift in ways that deserve scrutiny. Policymakers will need to ensure that the fiscal and social benefits of a growing affluent class translate into public investment that also lifts the core and aspiring consumer segments, rather than allowing consumption inequality to widen even as headline numbers improve.
There is genuine cause for optimism here too. An expanding affluent class typically signals a maturing economy with deepening financial markets, more sophisticated services, and a growing appetite for quality over price alone. It can catalyse investment in sectors from healthcare to education to hospitality that benefit the wider population even as they cater primarily to premium consumers. India’s demographic profile, with a median age far younger than China’s ageing population, gives it a structural advantage in sustaining this consumption growth over a longer horizon, provided the underlying economic fundamentals, job creation chief among them, keep pace.
The projection that India will overtake China in affluent consumers by 2036 is best read as a marker of transition, not arrival. It reflects real progress in incomes and spending power for a meaningful segment of Indians, and it will reshape how global companies view the country. But the more important story lies beneath the headline figure: whether this rising affluence broadens into genuinely inclusive growth, or whether it becomes another marker of an economy pulling apart at the seams even as its top tier prospers. How India answers that question over the next decade will matter far more than any single consumer spending statistic.
— DA Editorial Desk (Dhruba Deka)