Ten million dollars to bring Justin Bieber to Mumbai, India's financial capital, for a one-night performance.
A cruise with 800 guests around the Mediterranean at a cost of 150 million dollars.
A wedding ceremony with hundreds of guests and a price tag of over $600 million.
These are just some of the figures that have been bandied about in speculative and poorly sourced reports about how much money India's richest man may have spent on his youngest son's wedding celebrations.
Anant Ambani, son of business tycoon Mukesh Ambani, married his long-time girlfriend Radhika Merchant in a lavish ceremony held from July 12 to 14 that created a buzz in India and beyond.
The elder Ambani, chairman of conglomerate Reliance Industries, has an estimated net worth of $120.3 billion, making him the 11th richest person in the world, according to Forbes.
If true, the rumoured $600 million price tag would be equivalent to 0.5 per cent of Ambani's estimated wealth.
While weddings in India are typically lavish affairs — with people of all income levels often spending beyond their means — the sheer opulence of the Ambanis' celebrations has drawn attention to the South Asian country's growing wealth gap.
While India's rich are getting richer, most Indians, including the middle classes often held up as an example of the country's economic success in recent years, are moving on with their lives.
Compared with China, another rising economy, Indian consumers have much lower purchasing power and the country's middle class is heavily concentrated at the lower end of the income spectrum, according to a report published by Oxford Economics in May.
India's middle class, which numbers some 460 million people, has grown tenfold over the past 30 years, but according to Oxford Economics it is still less than half the size of China's, even though the two countries share a similar population of about 1.4 billion people.
By 2022, at least 660 million Chinese adults earned more than $10,000 a year, while only about a quarter of Indians earned the same, the report said.
Economist Thomas Piketty has famously said that India lacks a middle class.
By 2022, average middle-class incomes in India were less than a third of those in China, despite starting from a similar base in the 1990s, according to Oxford Economics.
The middle 40 percent in China earned $30,400 before tax on average in 2022, compared with $8,700 for their Indian counterparts, according to Oxford Economics.
“One of the reasons behind the relatively faster rise of China's middle-income class is probably its relatively rapid urbanisation,” Alexandra Hermann, senior economist at Oxford Economics, told Al Jazeera.
In China, government policies have successfully encouraged rural-urban migration, Hermann said.
However, India faces a number of challenges that make its people less able or less willing to migrate.
One is the ease of movement.
Large distances, combined with limited transportation infrastructure and strong linguistic differences between states, complicate internal migration, Hermann said.
The other is the lack of social welfare, which makes poor Indians want to stay close to the caste networks that provide some of that support informally.
India's middle and lower-middle classes shrank after the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the country's strong economic recovery, said Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center.
These classes are also “harmfully affected by recent inflation,” which hovered around 5.08 percent in June, up from 4.75 percent the previous month, Kugelman said, adding that “significant” inflation and the relentless challenge of unemployment have affected this section of the country.
“Unemployment disproportionately affects young people in India and since the country is demographically dominated by young people, there will naturally be a lot of lower and middle class people who will be affected,” Kugelman told Al Jazeera.
India also has state-level entitlement programs that act as a deterrent to rural-urban and interstate migration, Hermann said.
The growth of the middle class in India will require a reshuffling of income distribution, overall income growth, or a combination of both, Hermann said.
“In India, progress on various reforms to create jobs outside of agriculture will be crucial to increasing overall incomes and unlocking the purchasing power of the population,” he said.
