ABSTRACT
The celebration of the Indian middle class in recent years symbolises its dominant presence in the economy. To foreign investors and government officials, the middle class is a potential market and a testimony to the country’s economic progress. Whereas in the 1960s and 1970s India’s image was synonymous with poverty, in the 1980s and 1990s international attention has increasingly focused on the process of economic liberalisation and globalisation. The burgeoning middle class, which gained a new lease of life under a liberalised economic environment (post-1985), has emerged as a selling point for the country in international forums. Subsequent to India’s further economic liberalisation in July 1991, a report in Fortune magazine announced that the country’s attempt to enter the global economy offered ample ‘opportunities’, especially ‘the chance to sell to India’s huge middle class’ whose expansion, it claimed, was more rapid than that of other sections of the population (Jacob 1992:20). Similarly, at a business forum in Melbourne, India’s Minister of State for External Affairs strongly promoted India as an alternative to China by highlighting his country’s strengths, including an estimated middle class of over 250 million people (Caruana 1995:61).
