It was a strange detail to notice amid news of a disaster, but it struck me because it held a mirror up to a fast-changing India.
Fifteen Indians — 14 from third-party sales outfits and one company employee — were killed on July 11, when their sightseeing speedboat capsized off the island of Phu Quoc in Vietnam. The group was on an incentive vacation hosted by Indian smartphone maker Lava Mobiles.
The 14 top-performing distributors were from Tier 2 and
It was a strange detail to notice amid news of a disaster, but it struck me because it held a mirror up to a fast-changing India.
Fifteen Indians — 14 from third-party sales outfits and one company employee — were killed on July 11, when their sightseeing speedboat capsized off the island of Phu Quoc in Vietnam. The group was on an incentive vacation hosted by Indian smartphone maker Lava Mobiles.
The 14 top-performing distributors were from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. The company sponsoring the gig was not an automobile giant or a cosmetics multinational but a homegrown electronics company. And the product was not a car or a two-wheeler but a mobile phone.
It’s a story that seems to encapsulate the soaring aspiration levels in India today.
India’s consumption dreams were born in black-and-white and stayed that way for decades.
Movies were devoid of colour; so was TV. Walls were white (often painted with chuna or quicklime), lit by bright white tubelights. Then, ahead of the Asian Games in 1982, the country transitioned to colour. About 170 low-power transmitters set up across the country allowed rural towns and villages to tune in to colour-TV broadcasts. Those transmitters can in fact be said to have triggered the first of many waves of consumerism in India.
A TV set became the first consumer durable to enter many homes (often even before a refrigerator).
Then came economic liberalization, and the tsunami of capital, goods and investment. Cable TV, long before the internet, served as our link to a wider world. Foreign foods appeared in stores; we watched The Bold and the Beautiful; movies were released here simultaneously with the rest of the world.
We wanted more, and the markets willingly complied.
Items that once required a waitlist now became available straight out of the showroom: scooters, cars, big-screen TVs, two-door refrigerators, automatic washing machines. Tata ran an ad for its Indica that said: “50 cc moped. 100 cc mobike. 800 cc car. Now you can ask for more”. And we did.
***
In the 1980s, a typical middle-class living room in urban India held a sofa and box-like TV, a showcase, dining table and often, not far from it, a refrigerator proudly on display.
By the 1990s, the TV had started to get bigger. No one was boasting about a fridge. And the new dream was a two-wheeler, or perhaps even a Maruti 800, parked outside.
Then came the internet, mobile phones, smartphones. As I wrote in this year’s 10th-anniversary re-release of my book, Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles: India Through 60 Years of Advertising, about 350 million Indians had access to the internet in 2015. That number had crossed 900 million by 2025, and continues to rise.
India is the world’s leading consumer of mobile data (it helps that prices are still so low here), and more than 600 million people in the country now watch streaming platforms.
It wasn’t just that the internet offered direct access to the world, giving us a longer and louder list of material goals. The internet also gave us a place to boast about them.
A new motorcycle, recent vacation, fresh hairdo… all became statements of purpose: This is what I’m doing with my life.
This has contributed to a change in how we see ourselves. Which brings us to the death of…
***
The 1BHK, the hatchback, the simply family holiday in Kulu.
Is a 1BHK something to brag about? Shouldn’t it be two? And wouldn’t 2.5 be better?
Is a sedan something to drive to work in? When the couple next door just bought a small SUV?
Is a holiday in Kulu enough? Shouldn’t it at least be Koh Samet… though of course Korea would be better (if only because it clearly costs more?)?
As the landscape shifts, within a certain demographic, certain “old” products fade from view. Who builds a 1BHK in a prime suburb in a prime metro anymore? Who advertises their smallest car?
The shift shows up starkly in studies such as the HCES (Household Consumption Expenditure Survey), which examines monthly per-capita spends. HCES has been pointing to a shift towards non-food expenditure for about 15 years.
This is typical for a large and growing economy where food inflation is largely muted and there are shiny new things to buy. Between 2011-12 and 2023-24, for instance, MPCE on durable goods rose from 4.85% to 6.34% of household expenses in rural India and from 5.60% to 6.83% in urban India.
Perhaps even more interestingly, this trend is not restricted to the top six cities. Aspiration has spread its tentacles more or less wherever the smartphone has gone.
A report titled The Many Urban Indias, by the thinktank PRICE (People Research on India’s Consumer Economy) and Tata Sons, estimates that a total of 100 cities — not five or six — will drive India’s consumption journey.
In fact, the chart of per capita spending has shifted so dramatically, it has even redrawn the top spots.
Chandigarh and Thiruvananthapuram now top the per-capita household expenditure list. Vadodara, Surat, and Tirupur in Tamil Nadu spend more per-capita than Bengaluru and Delhi. (Of course, the dramatic wage, income and wealth disparities in the latter cities explain some of that distortion; the richest in cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru will still outspend the richest anywhere else in the country.)
***
This decline in demand for the 1BHK and dinky hatchback (in certain demographics) is not, of course, all bad news. It’s something we worked towards, as a country, and hoped would happen.
We of an earlier vintage remember dreaming our children would one day be confident and fearless enough to reason as they now do: “Why buy the entry-level car if a significantly better small SUV costs just ₹1 lakh or ₹2 lakh more?” or “Why not go for the 2 or 2.5 BHK? Friends can stay over, parents can visit comfortably, resale is more lucrative.”
It’s been interesting to see all this fuelled by a dramatically altered approach to borrowing.
Loans used to be a sign that something was either going very right or very wrong: a business was growing, a new house or car was in the works, or disaster had struck.
Today, a loan can be a matter of a shrug and a few clicks: taken for a holiday, that extra bedroom, new car, or to help pay for a wedding, honeymoon, new TV, air-conditioner, or phone. E-commerce websites are full of even smaller and more whimsical products that can be bought on EMI: lamps, clothes, cosmetics, videogame consoles.
Some of these schemes have faced criticism, for luring consumers into a debt trap.
When the whole family participates in the excess, it can be hard to keep up.
***
I hope that doesn’t bring us to the end of enough.
Indians have traditionally valued what we have. In some segments, I fear that that sense of enough may be fading fast. But that is an essay for another day.
Back to the 1BHK, 100 cc bike and 800 cc hatchback car, these will likely always have a large market in an emerging economy like ours. Already, we are seeing those markets redistributed, as we transition from a bottom-heavy pyramid to a more pear-shaped society with a very large middle class. (Again, something we aimed for, and worked towards.)
It’s not quite the yellow-brick road, though. Or maybe it is.
The challenge along the way will be for policymakers to ensure, through taxes, interest rates and levies, that the household debt burden does not follow the arc of aspiration and soar to untenable heights. This won’t be easy, in a country so vast and varied.
Meanwhile, now that we’re on this road, there is more or less no getting off it. And there is, of course, plenty to gain. As long as we don’t get pulled in by the illusion at the heart of it all.
(Ambi Parameswaran is a bestselling author, advertising veteran and independent brand coach. His latest is the updated 10th anniversary re-release of Nawabs, Nudes, Noodles: India Through 60 Years of Advertising)
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