Impetus for Rising Aspirations

The heterogeneity that characterizes the modern Indian consumer has created a tangle that marketers would like to unravel in order to target their products and services precisely. In this fortnightly series, Indicus Analytics presents the various facets of urban consumers, across geographies and socio-economic group

SEC c households, whose chief wage earners are skilled workers with no college degree or diploma, comprise earners are skilled workers with no EC C households, whose chief wage a little less than a quarter of all urban households. Among all the urban SEC C households, the second largest sub-segment is formed by households whose chief wage earners are in their middle years, married with young children. Most of these chief wage earners have completed higher secondary schooling, and some of them did attend college as well. These skilled workers prefer to work in regular salaried jobs that give them security of in- come, and just about a third of them run businesses of their own. There are a few urban areas where business dominates jobs, such as Varanasi, Jalpaiguri, Moradabad, Kannur and Jalgaon; in most cases the main business is trade with manufacturing taking the second spot.

Interestingly, even though education levels are not very high, a quarter of the chief wage earners have found jobs either in the government or large private or public limited companies. The sector that offers maximum earning opportunity is of course trade, wholesale or retail, while manufacturing, public administration and transport, storage and communication also have a large number of workers from this segment.

Spouses in this segment have low educational qualifications. Most of them prefer to stay home to look after young children, though some have taken

up jobs outside the house as well. There is, of course, limited scope for earning for these women, who have to balance their home and work responsibilities. In effect, most households have to be run on the earnings of just one person. Household incomes are, therefore, on the lower side, com- pared with the affluent SEC B and SEC A households. Here, almost 80% of the households earn less than `3 lakh per an- num. Moreover, the chief wage earner has to support a large household--more than one third have five or more members.

All households have young children, but most have just one or two children, follow- ing the trend towards smaller families in urban areas. However, there are some cit- ies where more than a third of the house- holds have more than two children--these are by and large in the northern states of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh. The cities of Aligarh, Panipat and Gwalior have the highest share of house- holds with more than two children.

There are some affluent households, earning more than `15 lakh per annum--the largest number of these house- holds is in Mumbai, Thane, Delhi and Ahmedabad. These cities offer ample scope for those with skills and enterprise to move into high income brackets. When it comes to durable assets, there is a slightly higher proportion of households owning their homes as opposed to living in rented accommodation. At this stage in life, chief wage earners are slowly making the move towards buying their homes.

Thane and Delhi stand out at the top with more households owned than rented, while Bangalore and Hyderabad are at the bottom with higher proportion of rented houses in this segment.

As far as consumer durables go, televisions are almost ubiquitous in households of this segment and two-wheelers dominate four-wheelers. Television is the main source of entertainment and news, with maximum time spent in a day here. It is in the smaller towns--such as Solan, Raigarh, Aligarh, Udaipur and Erode--that households in this segment spend more time watching television than larger cities, providing the impetus for raising aspiration levels.

 (Source - mintlive)