India's Trillion Dollar Dream: From Maggi Meals to Millionaire Deals

The Indian Story is no longer just a narrative—it's a reality that's reshaping the global economy, one ambitious leap at a time.Within a span of 20 years, India is trying to achieve something that took other developed nations 100 years. Proxies to such hyper-accelerated changes can really be seen in the world around us.

Writing about the India Story in this day and age is probably the last thing that might actually add value to the reader, however, before trends crystallise in spreadsheets, it’s the subtle, everyday observations that offer the first glimpses of what’s truly unfolding. The biggest of these is how people view money, getting rich, and wanting to make money today.

In all honesty, what I have access to is probably the farthest away from what India actually is. Mumbai isn’t the best place to be bullish about the prospects of India being the wealth-generating nation it is touted to be. But that, coupled with far-reaching social media penetration, gives a really good look into what the India of today aspires to be.

Before talking about the guy next door, we should talk about how, for the last 5 years, the government machinery and policymaking have shifted in their outlook and goal setting. The Modi government’s evolution from the foundational groundwork of the 2010s to the audacious ambitions of the 2020s marks a strategic shift that’s reshaping India’s future. The focus, along with ingenious marketing both within the mainland and abroad, has now completely shifted into this almost audacious goal of disturbing the status quo, standardizing what we have, innovating into what we don’t, and letting scale give exponential benefits for the next 20 years.

Once the exclusive domain of the ultra-wealthy, luxury experiences are now within arm’s reach of the Millennial and GenZ crowds, even if it means living on Maggi for a month to afford them. A simple stroll in the bylanes of Bandra on a Saturday night will show you how much the new generation is ready to splurge on an experience. Today’s youth, increasingly comfortable with informal credit, are unwittingly stepping into a future driven by consumption and easy access to formalized credit.

Mumbai’s real estate market is witnessing an unprecedented boom in ultra-luxury projects, a clear sign of the city’s evolving aspirations. Amenities and access to a decent life is a separate issue; people today want the comfort of gated communities, luxury professionally managed living projects—basically the sort of luxury that shows.

Coming to our favorite topic of gambling, trading, and get-rich-quick schemes. Today, probably the majority of Instagram influencers with cult followings are either selling a better lifestyle with more money and luxury or the apparent means to one. With alarming F&O volumes in the Indian markets, Insta-traders and gurus sell this proposition to even the 18-year-old guy in a remote Indian village, with effectively zero responsibility. A recent case comes to mind, wherein a flower seller had to use her life savings to buy an iPhone for her son on a hunger strike. The recent IPL saw a record number of bets placed by young Indians owing to the entry of a global betting app in Indian markets. First-hand stories regarding the same app involved a quantum of a few thousand rupees turning into a few lakhs and back to nil within an hour’s time. We can only imagine what this does to the psyche of an average person.

Post the 1990s, we saw the rising class of the ‘aspirational’ middle class. Increasing access to money and globalization has provided well enough means for this class to fulfill a part of its aspirations today. While the rise of disposable income has been correctly on the rise in the past years, I believe the wants and benchmark standard of living for a lot of this aspirational middle class is rising faster than their income. This will be the sole reason for satisfaction of the same either through irresponsible avenues or through the innovation, entrepreneurship, and fiscally constructive credit route.

The idea of these observations isn’t to draw concern or portray any fragility in the Indian Story. This is something we have seen before. The USA’s American Dream sold the idea of a consuming American with a house and access to free credit. China’s pivot in the 1980s, although a bit different, gave similar results. With its one-child policy, we saw something called the Little Emperor Syndrome, with a new generation that was the absolute favorite of parents with higher disposable incomes for all the needs and wants of the child. We saw an older generation that was cautious, with the younger one being risk-favoring and with a taste for consumption.

India’s 2047 dream hinges on fueling consumption through unprecedented access to real-time credit, propelling the nation toward sustained economic growth. The ULI is probably the one step that might have a major impact in disbursement and increasing access to credit to virtually the entire nation, a nation that already has a taste and want for the finer things in life. However, all of this is surely backed by India’s ability to actually generate meaningful growth and wealth on its increasing working population.

There is always going to be some sort of course correction or a hiccup arising from the yet-to-mature demographics—some over-optimism, some blinded bulls. But what I can see is that the idea of being richer, better protected, and having a better life has arisen and, for the first time, is quite attainable for a large chunk of the population.