Whither the middle class?

How to arrest a worldwide decline

As a son and grandson of doctors and a firm believer in a meritocratic education system, and thus a staunch Indian middle-class man, I get anxious when I read headlines in Indian as well as American and European media about the apparent dramatic decline in the middle class underway in the world.

PEW Research Center, a reputed American think tank, says that “the middle class in India is estimated to have shrunk by 32 million in 2020 as a consequence of the downturn, compared with the number it may have reached absent the pandemic”. Another report in the Journal of