The Wealth Gap Inside India's Middle Class

Vineeta Sharma had to take her family to the Supreme Court to establish something the Parliament had already written into law: a daughter has the same coparcenary rights as a son in a Hindu joint family. Her father had died before 9 September 2005, when an amendment to the Hindu Succession Act changed the legal position of daughters. Her family argued that the amendment came too late for her, and the Delhi High Court agreed. In 2020, the Supreme Court did not. A daughter’s right, it held, is hers by birth, whether or not her father was alive on the day the law changed.

It was a landmark ruling. It was also an admission. Fifteen years after Parliament acted, a woman needed the country’s highest legal authority to confirm what had already been written into law. Most women never get that far. Most women never file.

India’s aspirational middle and upper-middle classes are considered an important engine of the country’s economy, projected to drive 93 per cent of all consumer spending by 2036. This high-spending middle class is the fastest-growing major segment of the Indian population in absolute terms, expanding by 338 million between 1995 and 2021. And as this class expands, so does its ambition. Families that once measured security through a house, a car and a steady salary now accumulate multiple cars, properties and financial investments.

Affluence is often mistaken for equality. It is widely assumed that in wealthy families, material abundance translates into equal financial security, and that when a family has enough to give, it gives equally. But a daughter can grow up in the same house as her brother, attend the same school, get the same degree and build a career as successful as his, and still be less likely to own or control the family’s most valuable assets.

This contradiction is easy to miss because inequality inside prosperous homes rarely looks like deprivation. It looks, instead, like a house that will inevitably belong to the son, a family business registered under his name, or a second flat described as his responsibility. It looks like a daughter being told she has relinquished her share of the family wealth because her parents paid for her education or wedding.

But the law, too, has its limits. The Hindu Succession Act applies to Hindus, a category that includes Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs; Muslims, Christians and Parsis are governed by different succession laws. And equal coparcenary rights do not mean that every asset a parent owns must automatically be divided equally between a son and daughter. The legal position depends, among other things, on the nature of the property and the applicable personal law. A person may also use a will to determine the succession of property they are legally entitled to dispose of. Equality under succession law does not automatically produce equality in the transfer of wealth.

Ownership, too, is not control. A flat may be registered in a daughter’s name while her father decides whether to rent it, mortgage it or sell it. And the numbers point to a wider gender gap in asset ownership. The National Family Health Survey for 2019–21 found that women were less likely than men to own a house or land, either alone or jointly. The word ‘jointly’ carries a great deal of ambiguity. It does not tell us who bought the property, who makes decisions about it, or who actually controls it. The Agricultural Census has also shown a significant gender gap in operational landholdings. But there are no national datasets that neatly track how urban, middle-class families divide property between their sons and daughters.

Deeya, 27, has an MBA from the United States and a well-paying job in Gurgaon. She also knows, without having been told directly, that the ancestral home will go to her brother.

“It was understood that the house was bhaiya’s. No one really had to tell me. I didn’t want to ask because I didn’t want to be the one making it about money.”

Her father, Abhishek, does not see a problem with this. “We paid for her education, we paid for her wedding. And she is settled now. She has her husband’s house.”

The two accounts sit side by side in the living room.

Ask the parents and they will tell you the same thing: “We love our daughters, we educate them, we would never treat them differently.” This is not necessarily a lie. There is no villain in this story. There is a father who paid for an education and genuinely believes that he has been generous. There is also a brother carrying the weight of expectations, and a mother who may have seen this happen in her own family and now sees it happen to her daughter.

The law cannot reach into the living room. It cannot make a father ask whether the house should have been discussed with his daughter. What it offers is a right that a woman may have to claim against the people who raised her. The people who hold the wealth have enough to give it: not through a will that can be rewritten, not after a decade-long court case, but now.

The gap, then, is not always between a wealthy family and a poor daughter. It can exist between two children who went to the same school, lived in the same house and were given the same opportunities, but entered adulthood with very different claims on the wealth their family accumulated.

For India’s expanding middle class, this question is only becoming more consequential. As families accumulate second homes, investment portfolios, businesses and other forms of capital, the question is no longer simply whether a daughter was educated, supported or loved equally. It is what happened to the wealth. A family can say that its son and daughter are equal. It can believe it, too. But when the house is transferred, when the business is handed over, when the investments are divided, equality becomes something more concrete than a principle. It becomes a number.