India’s professional class has little political clout: When the Godrej family divided its businesses between two branches in 2024, the striking feature was not simply that a large Indian business house had managed a succession without a public feud. It was the confidence that there would be another generation to inherit the enterprise, and that ownership could be organised accordingly. The family’s agreement created two distinct business groups, with ownership and management passing into different branches of the family.
Set this beside a very different conversation in the urban media consumed by India’s professional class. A recent Mint article asked whether a Bengaluru DINK couple earning ₹3 lakh a month could retire at 50. Voluntary childlessness, pets as family and freedom from long commitments have become familiar subjects across lifestyle and personal-finance pages.
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These are legitimate lifestyle choices. They also reveal something about the anxieties of a neo-urban professional class dealing with expensive housing, demanding careers, children, healthcare and an uncertain future. At one end, established business families plan across generations. At the other, professionals increasingly learn to optimise within the household they have today. The latter group is economically significant: it is concentrated in the formal economy, contributes substantially to direct taxation and has helped drive the growth of financial savings and discretionary consumption. Yet its economic weight has produced surprisingly little organised political leverage.
The Union government’s revised estimate for 2025-26 puts taxes on income at ₹13.12 lakh crore, compared with ₹11.09 lakh crore from corporation tax. The two categories are not directly comparable with household income tax and corporate tax because the former also includes securities transaction tax and other receipts, but the figures underline the scale of the non-corporate tax base.
Mancur Olson explained the underlying problem decades ago: concentrated interests find it easier to organise than dispersed ones. Indian business has CII, FICCI and numerous sectoral associations that can represent its interests. Farmers have organisations capable of converting grievances into bargaining power. The salaried professional has an RWA for the apartment complex, perhaps a professional association concerned with the occupation, and social media when the problem falls outside either. Taken together, these provide little sustained political or institutional leverage.
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India’s professional class
IAS officer Tukaram Mundhe’s current tenure as Commissioner of Maharashtra’s Food and Drug Administration offers a useful illustration. The state FDA lists him in that position, and the department has highlighted enforcement action on food safety. His enforcement drive has been welcomed by consumers, including affluent Indians who eat at the same restaurants and buy from the same retailers. When businesses are affected by suspensions and penalties, however, public approval carries little institutional weight. Firms can go to court, challenge orders and create a legal record that remains after the officer has moved on. The same social group can applaud stricter enforcement while the affected commercial interests use institutions to protect themselves.
India’s professional class, by contrast, expends considerable emotional energy on public life. Its discourse around elections, municipal failure, corruption, institutional decline and the state’s failure to deliver basic services is often informed and highly vocal. Yet once the news cycle passes, it rarely translates into sustained collective action.
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The condition of Indian cities illustrates the problem. Wealthier households can retreat into protected enclaves, while middle-class households deal with flooded roads, open manholes, encroached pavements and unreliable public services. The response is often individual exit. Weak public schools lead households towards private schools. Unreliable public healthcare encourages greater dependence on insurance and private hospitals. Water tankers, generators, private security and gated housing have grown around gaps in public provision. The household becomes better at insulating itself from the state while the citizen acquires little additional capacity to influence it.
That distinction is important because the advantage of established business families is not wealth alone. It is continuity. Family interests are carried across generations, while business associations remain engaged irrespective of which party is in power. The professional class is perfectly capable of long-term planning. It can invest through a SIP for 30 years, calculate a retirement corpus to the last crore and insure itself against risks that may never materialise. What it has struggled to do is turn those individual calculations into a collective interest.
This puts the DINK conversation in a different light. Voluntary childlessness does not imply indifference to the future. It reflects, in part, a wider disposition in which long-term commitments are assessed through the same calculations applied to housing, careers and retirement: what will they cost, what risks will they create, and how much freedom will remain?
The deeper asymmetry is therefore between private foresight and collective continuity. India’s professional class has become adept at securing the future of the household. It has been far less successful at securing the institutions on which that household depends. It can calculate how many crores it needs to retire at 50 while having little influence over whether the road outside its apartment will be under water next August.
Kiran J Mahasuar is Assistant Professor of Strategy, SP Jain Institute of Management & Research (SPJIMR).