We are like that only

Just finished reading a book by Rama Bijapurkar,‘We are like that only’. The author has some interesting observations about how companies in the past have faltered by overestimating the size of Indian middle class and considering it as a homogenous group. She therefore recommends constructing the picture of India based on your product class / industry and not going by the ‘one-size-fits-all’ estimates.

She also gives it a historical perspective by linking it to the addition of capacities in the mid 90’s and how by 2000, some of these hopes were squashed. She also emphasizes the ‘Great Indian rope trick of numbers’ – how even small percentages in the Indian context can mean large markets.