Breaking down the question
This is a ten-mark question, so the examiner wants a focused, well-illustrated account rather than an essay. The operative phrase is new middle class — the word new signals a contrast with the older, largely salaried and state-employed middle class that emerged under colonial and Nehruvian conditions. Your answer must therefore identify what is distinctively new about this stratum, chiefly its emergence in the wake of the economic liberalisation of the early 1990s.
The salient features asked for are the defining, marked characteristics — its economic base, its cultural style, its self-image and its politics. A good answer treats the new middle class not merely as an income bracket but as a social group with a shared lifestyle and outlook.
How to approach it
Open with a one-line contrast between the old and the new middle class, then list the salient features with brief illustration. Keep the structure tight — four or five well-chosen features, each with a sentence of explanation, will outperform a sprawling account. Draw on Leela Fernandes's influential characterisation of the new middle class as defined as much by consumption and cultural style as by occupation.
For the wider context of class formation and stratification, see the note on middle classes in India.
Model answer
The new middle class in India is the stratum that expanded rapidly after the economic liberalisation of 1991, and it is best understood by contrast with the older middle class of clerks, teachers and state functionaries that preceded it. Several salient features distinguish it.
First, its economic base lies in the new service economy — information technology, finance, media, corporate management and allied professions — rather than in secure government employment. Its fortunes are tied to private enterprise and to global markets, which makes it more dynamic but also more insecure than the old salaried class.
Second, it is defined heavily by consumption and lifestyle. As Leela Fernandes argues, membership in the new middle class is signalled through patterns of spending — branded goods, private education, foreign travel, housing in gated enclaves — as much as through occupation. Consumption becomes a language of status and belonging.
Third, it is culturally aspirational and often bilingual, valuing English-medium education and professional credentials as the primary route to mobility. It presents itself as meritocratic and modern, distancing itself from older markers of caste and region even while these continue to shape its recruitment.
Fourth, it is politically influential beyond its numbers. It shapes public discourse through the media it consumes and produces, and it tends to favour a politics of governance, efficiency and urban development. Critics note that its concerns can marginalise the rural poor and the informal working class.
Fifth, it remains internally uneven — drawn disproportionately from upper and dominant castes and from urban backgrounds, so its meritocratic self-image conceals significant inequalities of access. André Béteille cautioned against treating the middle class as a homogeneous or purely economic category.
In sum, the new middle class is distinguished by its base in the liberalised service economy, its consumption-driven identity, its aspirational and English-oriented culture, and its outsized cultural and political voice — even as its composition reveals continuing structural privilege.
Examiner's perspective
At ten marks the discriminator is economy of expression — examiners reward candidates who name four or five sharp features and illustrate each, rather than writing loosely about the middle class in general. Two things lift a script: an explicit contrast with the old middle class, and a named source such as Fernandes on consumption. A common weakness is describing the middle class only as an income group; the stronger answer treats it as a cultural formation with a distinctive lifestyle and politics.