The same article has other stat that says anywhere between 30-300 million are considered middle class.

Is there a consensus among economists on what the real number is ?

My wife’s most cited and quoted paper is on correctly defining the Indian middle class. Happy to share the link if there’s interest.

Original paper (pdf): https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sandhya_Krishnan/public...

Quora answer quoting her work (layman’s terms): https://www.quora.com/How-big-is-Indias-real-middle-class-in...

I’m interested, please post the link to the paper.

Original paper (pdf): https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sandhya_Krishnan/public...

Quora answer quoting her work (layman’s terms): https://www.quora.com/How-big-is-Indias-real-middle-class-in...

Yes, I’m interested too.

Original paper (pdf): https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sandhya_Krishnan/public...

Quora answer quoting her work (layman’s terms): https://www.quora.com/How-big-is-Indias-real-middle-class-in...

It's obviously not an exact science, since "middle class" has as much to do with how people define their own social status as it has to do with their actual income. But those measures counting hundreds of millions of Indians as middle class are doing that by including people surviving on a few dollars a day. Maybe in an Indian context where poverty is widespread this is considered middle class, but it's quite misleading to present that as middle class to a Western audience.

I'm willing to bet that the disposable income of the US/EU middle classes exceeds that of the Indian one at least 10:1, for now.

It's about the same size as France, who matches India in real gdp

That is not the claim that was being made though. The one I replied to said India's middle class was bigger than the American and European ones. Being comparable to country with 5% of India's population basically just underlines the fact that India's middle class is tiny.