The good:

* Fifty million more households in India will join the ranks of the middle class — defined by those earning between Rs 75,000 a year to Rs 10 lakh a year.

* The households-in-middle class number will jump from less than 120 million now to almost 170 million. Taking the accepted multiple of five people per household, this means that roughly 800 million Indians will be middle class out of an end-of-decade population of 1.3-plus billion.

And not-so-good (if there are no significant reforms):

By end-2019, UP’s standard of living will be what Pakistan’s was in 2005. And Bihar at the end of the decade will offer a standard of living comparable to what prevailed in Djibouti in 2005. MP in 2020? Like Republic of Congo in 2005.

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Prosperity gets in the way of family and corporate relationships, writes Raju Bist

In the mid-1990s, when the Birla family, which ran India’s second-largest business group, was in the midst of a bitter division of assets, one young family member quipped that “blood is thicker than water. But profits are thicker than blood.” A decade later, the country’s fast-rising prosperity is causing even more confrontations.

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