.. is that they are a fairly small part of the total population and thus have a social call to show their relative wealth compared to the "poor people" and thus there is a lot of spending on flash things and a lot less savings.
(Note that this is an outside view so may be distorted, but based on talking with quite many people from India over the years)
Stepping a bit higher, India is really scewing up with the pandemic. It is a crowded country but there are some absurdly bad violations of social distancing going on. Masses crowded shoulder to shoulder for religious festivals for example. For any country, where there's a second, third, fourth, etc wave of covid, it is usually because of crowd behavior and not because a new variant. People get lax with behavior when the numbers go down, which makes the numbers go up. Yes, the economics are bad, but the economics cannot get better when so many people decide that it is all a hoax and ignore common sense about reducing virus spread.
In other words, there is a disaster and the behavior in response to it is increasing the disaster far beyond what it could be.
The problem with the middle class in India.. (Score:3)
.. is that they are a fairly small part of the total population and thus have a social call to show their relative wealth compared to the "poor people" and thus there is a lot of spending on flash things and a lot less savings.
(Note that this is an outside view so may be distorted, but based on talking with quite many people from India over the years)
Re:The problem with the middle class in India.. (Score:2)
Stepping a bit higher, India is really scewing up with the pandemic. It is a crowded country but there are some absurdly bad violations of social distancing going on. Masses crowded shoulder to shoulder for religious festivals for example. For any country, where there's a second, third, fourth, etc wave of covid, it is usually because of crowd behavior and not because a new variant. People get lax with behavior when the numbers go down, which makes the numbers go up. Yes, the economics are bad, but the economics cannot get better when so many people decide that it is all a hoax and ignore common sense about reducing virus spread.
In other words, there is a disaster and the behavior in response to it is increasing the disaster far beyond what it could be.