“White Concreen

The white -collar middle class in India is subject to increased economic pressure, as the discounts in the functions led by artificial intelligence, stagnant salaries, and collapsed consumption, reach the profits of corporate and family budgets alike, warns the founder of investment managers in Marilus Surab Mukherjia.

In a blog, Mukherjia put the economic pressure facing the middle class in India. Since Diwali 2023, the growth of corporate profits in India has declined, as it decreased down with a sharp slowdown in consumption, which constitutes 60 % of GDP.

At the heart of the consumption crisis, there is a blatant fact: creating job opportunities for workers with white collar may slow down, and it has stoked real wages.

“The labor market suffers from a post -employment employment and the permanent impact of replacing human roles,” he writes Mukherjia.

During the epidemic, companies rushed to employment. Indian information technology companies alone added approximately 800,000 workers between 2020 and 2022, betting on a long -term digital boom. But the request was cooled in 2024, which led to the demobilization of collective workers – even in giants such as Google, Microsoft and TCS. Now, Mukherjea notes, even financial flow companies falling employees.

The most anxious is the structural shift: artificial intelligence works to automate the tasks of complex offices. Google Bots now admitted dealing with a quarter of her coding. Marcellus has found itself that the competitors of artificial intelligence research are the work of experienced analysts.

Mukherjea cited the SIMINAL 2003 paper by economists Richard Mornan, David Outor and Frank Levy, who have warned that automation would erod the functions of the middle class-especially those that involve routine or unrequited skills.

“Their visions, despite their focus on the United States, are now on Indian white workers,” he says.

This disorder shows starkly in salary checks. The analysis of the 50 largest companies listed in India reveals that the average salary has failed to keep up with inflation since the 2016 fiscal year. The workers of the middle layer who depend only on the high wages of the earth even against the basic living costs such as food.

The largest employers in India are quickly axis. In July 2025, CEO of TCS K Krithivasan said that the company will reduce its operating power by 2 %, noting that AI’s adoption is widely. The CEO of HCL Tech C Vijayakumar went further, pledged to double revenues of half the number of employees.

The middle class, which was once, the engine of the story of India’s consumption, finds itself now at the sharp end to reorganize Amnesty International-less, not save anything, and spend it with caution.