India's middle class under strain: Educated employed but still struggling

In a darkened control room in Navi Mumbai, 100 operators oversee bots monitoring 30,000 ATMs across India.
Their cameras, sensors and bots do the work that 60,000 security guards once did. That control room is a small window into something much larger.
Across India, the quiet machinery of automation has been reshaping – and in many cases, eliminating – the jobs that the middle class was built on. And the middle class is only now beginning to reckon with what that means.
As stable incomes come under pressure, many are turning to riskier ways of making money to bridge the gap.
Consider VS, a 27-year-old BTech graduate from a small town near Bhilwara city in western Rajasthan state. He earns 14,000 rupees a month as a freelance salesperson.
Last year, he lost 1.3m rupees – nearly his entire family’s savings – trading Futures and Options on the stock market. He is one of nine million Indians doing the same thing – and are collectively losing over $12bn a year. That figure is roughly equal to the federal government’s entire annual education budget.
These are not gamblers. They are educated, aspirational people with nowhere else to put their ambitions.