Marketers in India are pleasantly surprised by the buoyancy, and critically the quality of consumer demand of late. The first eight months of the year saw car and bike sales go through the roof, growing around 30% over last year. Most car and bike makers report better traction for their high-end vehicles compared to entry-level models. Though not strictly comparable, sales of the world?s cheapest car, Nano, has nosedived from a high of over 9,000 a few months ago to just 500 in November.

Retail audit firm Nielsen recently reported that the premium range of consumer expendables?like deodorants, hair colour, noodles and chocolates?is growing at double the clip in rural India compared to big cities. Food inflation, which has been persistently high through the year, settling at 8.6% for the latest period available, too, is driven largely by ?quality? food like vegetables, fruits, meat, fish, dairy and poultry.

In the GDP growth figures announced for July-September, private consumption has grown an impressive 9.3%, concomitant with GDP growth of 8.5%. Rise in consumers? income, purchasing power and wider availability of goods & services has obviously fuelled this demand. More people consuming more make for a bigger and faster growing market. But interestingly, a new ground up study?India Consumer Landscape 2010?amongst 2,59,000 people spread across 101 cities and over 1,000 villages by research firm JuxtConsult, points to a huge underestimation, not so much of the size but the contours of the consuming class in India.

True, just about 5% (or 64 million people) in urban India can be classified as upper class, and another 15% as middle class in income terms. But it is when you start analysing the households in terms of socio-economic (SEC) terms, and that too on the highest education and occupation level of any member of the family, like the JuxtConsult study has done, instead of the traditional occupation/education of just the chief wage earner (CWE), that a new consumer paradigm starts to emerge.

For instance, taking the old CWE-led definition of SEC, 9% of urban and 10% of rural households fall in the topmost SEC-A and R1 categories, respectively. But consider the education and occupation of any member of the family and the number of SEC-A urban households jumps 11% and R1 in rural India almost doubles to 19%. Similarly, the proportion of SEC-B households in cities figure at 17% as compared to 14%, and R2 in villages move up from 19% to 27%. Importantly, the lowest SEC category, SEC-E in urban and R5 in rural areas, shows a marked decline in this new ?any member? system, down 26% from 37% in urban areas and 10% from 23% in rural areas.

There are 78 million families in urban India. According to this new criterion, the increase in number of SEC-A and SEC-B families in urban India is over 3 million, including 1.6 million for SEC-A ones. In villages with 164 million families, the top two family classes, R1 & R2, go up by a whopping 28 million, including 15 million for R1 alone!

Now all things constant, one?s education and occupation is a fairly good marker of ambition, exposure and propensity to consume. And even as nuclearisation of families takes firm root in the country, Indians still buy and consume largely as a family unit and not necessarily as individuals, unlike the West. Therefore, the education and occupation of any member here has more direct bearing on the family?s consumption choices. Perhaps it is the heft of these 16 million families hitherto unaccounted in topmost SECs, which is propelling demand for better cars, bikes, skin creams and shampoos.

The sachetisation of expendables and availability of consumer finance for durables like cars and bikes have, no doubt, enabled the marketer to turn consumption desire into demand but what got millions more into the ?quality? consumption mindset in the first place, apart from income, is the fundamental building blocks of rising education and of more skilled occupations.

The SEC follows the demographic breakup from the 2001 census, and much has changed in India in the 2000s. The JuxtConsult study, field work for which was conducted in March-April 2010, may then just be a prelude to what Census 2011 may discover about consumption and consumers in 21st-century India.

?shailesh.dobhal@expressindia.com