Anant Ambani’s glitzy wedding highlights India’s ‘missing middle class’

India’s middle class is much poorer than China’s after decades of strong growth despite starting at a similar base.

Ten million dollars to fly Justin Bieber to India’s financial capital Mumbai for an evening’s performance.

An 800-guest cruise around the Mediterranean costing $150m.

A wedding ceremony featuring hundreds of guests and a price tag upwards of $600m.

These are just some of the numbers that have been bandied about in thinly sourced, speculative reports about how much India’s richest man may have splashed on the wedding celebrations of his youngest child.

Anant Ambani, the son of tycoon Mukesh Ambani, married his longtime girlfriend Radhika Merchant in a lavish ceremony held from July 12 to 14 that set tongues wagging in India and further afield.

The elder Ambani, the chairman of conglomerate Reliance Industries, has an estimated net worth of $120.3bn, making him the 11th richest person in the world, according to Forbes.

If true, the wedding’s rumoured sticker price of $600m would be equivalent to 0.5 percent of Ambani’s estimated wealth.

While weddings in India are typically lavish affairs – with people across income brackets often spending beyond their means – the sheer opulence of the Ambanis’ celebrations has drawn attention to the South Asian country’s growing wealth divide.

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 muddling on.

Compared with fellow rising economy China, India’s consumers have far less spending power, with the country’s middle class heavily concentrated at the lower end of the income spectrum, according to a report released by Oxford Economics in May.

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