'corporate Ladders Are Gone': Saurabh Mukherjea Warns India's Middle Class Must Pivot Or Perish

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Conventional white-collar employment has been steadily eroding, weakened by lacklustre backstage assemblage capex, automation, AI adoption, and stagnant existent costs growth.

India’s mediate people is undergoing a structural upheaval, and nan cracks are widening. In a crisp test of nan post-Covid economical landscape, Nandita Rajhansa and Saurabh Mukherjea of Marcellus Investment Managers reason that nan property of nan salaried professional—or “salaryman”—is drafting to a close. 

What lies up is simply a world wherever entrepreneurial drive, not occupation tenure, defines economical progress.

According to nan duo, accepted white-collar employment has been steadily eroding, weakened by lacklustre backstage assemblage capex, automation, AI adoption, and stagnant existent costs growth.

“The gradual shrinking of nan economical abstraction wrong which achromatic collar professionals operate,” they write, “and nan blossoming of nan Indian entrepreneur has respective ramifications for nan distribution of wealth, powerfulness & power successful India.”

Citing Income Tax data, nan statement highlights that while 227,000 Indians now study yearly incomes supra ₹1 crore—a sixfold jump successful a decade—most of these earners are not salaried labor climbing nan firm ladder.

Instead, they are “Octopus” families and entrepreneurial entities generating multi-source income done business ownership, politics, existent estate, and equity markets.

Crucially, nan statement identifies a taste displacement successful India Inc itself: for nan first time, a mostly of promoters and executive board successful Nifty50 companies travel from non-elite acquisition backgrounds. The accepted IIT-IIM pipeline nary longer dominates leadership. “This is remarkable,” they observe, contrasting it pinch FY03, erstwhile conscionable 40% of apical activity came from specified non-elite routes.

The accusation is stark for nan municipality mediate class. With occupation maturation tapering and inflation-adjusted net hikes falling beneath 2%, professionals are being pushed to pivot. “This people of Indians will person to displacement towards entrepreneurial opportunities,” nan authors warn.

However, this modulation demands a psychological overhaul—away from capacity metrics and hierarchical promotions toward risk-taking, self-learning, and semipermanent strategical thinking. The study makes it clear: nan worker mindset—rooted successful predictability, structure, and outer validation—is poorly suited to nan volatile, high-stakes world of entrepreneurship.

Rajhansa and Mukherjea reason that arsenic firm India embraces shareholder capitalism and churns executives successful three-year “World Cup cycles,” entrepreneurs will beryllium nan ones playing nan infinite game. For India’s mediate class, nan prime is nary longer betwixt 1 institution and another—it’s betwixt being employed, aliases becoming economically applicable astatine all.

Published on: May 6, 2025 12:48 PM IST

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