 1% richest Indians capture 20% of national income in 2014. This is up from about 6% in the mid-1980s. And we observe before, from 1938 to the mid-1980s, a sharp reduction in the share of income held by the top 1% from about a bit more than 21% or around 21% to 6% due to a series of shocks on the owners of capital due also to the implementation of regulation policies so nationalizations of many sectors of the economy including banking, transportation, including a lot of sectors of the economy along with very high tax rates, so tax progressivity was very high in the 60s, 70s, up to the early 80s with the top marginal income tax rate going as high as 97% with an inheritance tax implemented for a short period of time during this period and with in fact an explicit objective by Nero and by his followers to limit the power of the economic elite so this was clearly one of the objectives of the government and so this period which starts at the beginning of the Second World War which is prolonged after independence actually follows a period of rise in income inequality from the start of the Indian income tax from 1922 to 1938 during which we witness, we observe a rise in inequality which is likely to be due to economic transformations at the time which favored capitalists over workers so basically from 1952 to the mid 80s clearly you see a reduction in top income levels so there is a reduction in income so negative growth for individuals at the very top of the social ladder or of the income distribution as economists say and growth mostly benefited to the bottom 50% the middle income group, the middle 40% from 1950 to the mid 1980s now of course overall growth was much lower or slightly lower in the 70s and the 80s and 90s than in the next period but in the next period if growth rate were higher it was essentially captured this new growth was essentially captured by the top of the distribution the top 10%, the top 1% in fact from 1980 to 2014 the top 0% the richest 0% Indians captured as much growth as the entire bottom 50% combined this highlights the very unequal nature of shining India of the growth policies implemented over the past decades and in fact the fact that basically the majority of the population did not experience the kinds of growth rate that we hear in the media regularly these growth rates in fact the growth rate that they experienced were lower than the average basically what we see in this data goes contrary to this intuition in public discourse in the mind of a lot of people that there was high middle class growth I mean the middle 40% grew at a faster rate in the 2000 and the 2010s faster at a faster rate than in the 90s than in the 80s however what we show in this paper is that it grew much less than the average and in fact shining India essentially happened at the very top of the distribution so then the question we ask is how do we define a middle class this is not an easy task to do if we define it in a very simple way there are many different ways to define it but in a very simple term as the individuals between above the poorest half and below the richest 10% so the middle 40% well these group of individuals didn't benefit a lot from the high growth years of the post 2000s