The cold reality about India’s middle class

The world's largest maker of air-conditioners (ACs) is the latest to bet big on the Indian market. In an interview with the Financial Times newspaper recently, the chief executive of Japan's Daikin, Masanori Togawa, said that India "would turn into a market as giant as China in the future, as the middle class and the wealthy are growing tremendously.” The company, which is also a beneficiary of India's production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme, sees India as a major export hub and sees a tripling of products manufactured in India and exported elsewhere, by 2025. In comparing the potential of the Indian…