India’s New Wealth Is Exposing An Old Social Problem
· Free Press Journal
There is a simple test of prosperity that no economic survey captures. Watch how an affluent customer speaks to a waiter after an expensive meal, a resident confronts a security guard, a passenger argues with an airline employee or a consumer reacts to a delayed delivery. The tone can change when the other person has less money or power.
India’s economic mobility deserves celebration. Families that once lived with scarcity can now afford homes, cars, travel, education, healthcare, and experiences their parents could only imagine. Yet, there is an uncomfortable possibility in this new prosperity: we may be becoming better at displaying what we have than at understanding what it gives us no right to do to others.
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We can be extraordinarily deferential to the powerful and casually dismissive of those below us. A designation, surname, accent, school, occupation, neighbourhood or connection can still determine how quickly respect is offered. Economic mobility has disrupted some old hierarchies, but the instinct to rank people remains stubbornly intact.
The service economy makes this particularly visible. The waiter, driver, delivery rider, cleaner, security guard, technician, and restaurant worker have become essential to urban convenience, yet their time is often treated as cheaper than ours. We expect flexibility from them while guarding our own time fiercely. Their labour matters when we need it and becomes almost invisible once the need has been met.
Domestic workers expose an even deeper faultline. A household of educated people and professionals may speak comfortably about equality while expecting the person who cooks, cleans or cares for children to reorganise her life around theirs. Her leave becomes an inconvenience, her family emergency a disruption. The household may depend on her work every day, while still regarding it as low-status. Prosperity can reduce the physical burden of domestic life without redistributing responsibility or improving the dignity attached to care.
Status anxiety makes this worse. The apartment, car, school, club, restaurant, holiday, and brand can become signals that a family has arrived. Social media turns private consumption into public comparison. For families that have fought their way out of scarcity, this desire is understandable. The trouble begins when achievement becomes entitlement, and the ability to pay is mistaken for a claim over another person’s dignity.
Our obsession with convenience has another cost. Someone absorbs the inconvenience we no longer see. The rider navigates traffic to deliver dinner. The driver waits outside the school. The cleaner adjusts to household schedules. The security guard works through the night. The warehouse worker handles orders arriving at our doorstep with astonishing speed. Modern urban comfort increasingly depends on an invisible transfer of time, effort, and risk from those with less bargaining power to those with more.
Technology has made that transfer easier to ignore. An app can summon a car without requiring us to know the driver’s story. A platform can deliver food without showing the conditions in which the delivery worker operates. A complaint can generate a ticket number without producing a person accountable for solving it. Digital efficiency is valuable, but when human contact disappears, so can human responsibility.
Social media has made this harsher. Anonymous handles and political content factories churn out abuse, ridicule, insinuation, and character attacks because outrage travels faster than restraint. Women often face the ugliest combination of sexualised abuse, threats, and doxxing. People can display online cruelty they might never risk face-to-face.
Children absorb these hierarchies long before adults realise they are teaching them. They see the parent who speaks carefully to a senior executive and snaps at the driver. Children notice whether the waiter is thanked, the cleaner greeted, and the security guard acknowledged. A child learns who matters by watching how adults distribute respect.
Corporate India offers a polished version of the same contradiction. Companies speak the language of inclusion and psychological safety, yet hierarchy can still become permission for senior ranks to interrupt, belittle or intimidate.
Public spaces reveal the habit in smaller ways. Queue-jumping, aggressive driving, littering, blocking access, ignoring accessibility needs, and demanding exceptions may appear trivial. They reveal an old Indian comfort with VIP treatment. Jugaad can be ingenuity, but it can also become an excuse for bypassing rules designed to protect everyone else. When private convenience repeatedly takes precedence over public fairness, civic life becomes a negotiation between competing entitlements.
None of this negates India’s extraordinary capacity for generosity. Indians donate during disasters, help strangers, support relatives, and rally around people in crisis. Everyday dignity is harder because it is quiet and unrewarded. It means paying fairly and on time, allowing a worker to take leave, respecting another person’s time, following the queue, and absorbing a small inconvenience without passing it on. That is where prosperity becomes a test of character, not merely purchasing power.
Regulation can establish minimum standards. Companies can publish codes. Platforms can moderate abuse. Schools can teach citizenship. None can substitute for social habits formed in homes, workplaces, neighbourhoods, and public spaces. Culture changes when behaviour once tolerated becomes unacceptable, especially when the person behaving badly has the money, status or influence to get away with it.
India’s next stage of prosperity should, therefore, be judged by more than income and consumption. Economic mobility should make people more secure, not more status-conscious. Greater convenience should make us more aware of the labour behind it. Having more should enlarge our sense of responsibility rather than our expectation of privilege.
Perhaps the most revealing measure of prosperity is also the simplest: how do we treat the person who cannot advance our interests, improve our status or return the favour?
It tells us what our prosperity is doing to us.
Dr Srinath Sridharan is a policy researcher and corporate adviser. X: @ssmumbai