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I live in Tamil Nadu, in a facility renowned for its top-class service and justly famous food. We are served morning coffee, breakfast, lunch, evening refreshments and dinner. The cost is Rs 400 per day per person. For a couple, the monthly food bill comes to Rs 24,000. Given that the urban Indian family spends roughly 40% of their consumption expenditure on food on average, a family of two would need to earn at least Rs 60,000 a month to afford this standard of living. This requirement places them in the top 5% of Indian households. It is established now, even by official data, that for 95% of the population, such meals are unaffordable.

Tellingly, even within our facility, the cost is prohibitive for many families who have been forced to make alternative dining arrangements.

To put this in a global context, consider California, where a standard Grande Starbucks Caffè Latte costs approximately $6. With over 2,000 retail locations across the state, Starbucks is hardly an elite restaurant. Yet an entire day of fine vegetarian dining would not buy two cups of its coffee in California. The reason for this disparity is that the wages for workers are a pittance in India, lower even than would be considered starvation wages in any better-off nation.

Inequality is structured

Behind the seamless daily cycle of meals lies a chain of undervalued labourers. This includes the kitchen staff who arrive before dawn, the servers and cleaners working grueling shifts and, most of all, an agricultural supply chain where the farmers rarely turn a sustainable profit on the produce they grow.

This reality exposes a truth: the comfort of the few in India is subsidised by the low wages and income of the majority. Our overall growth narratives are completely detached from the struggle for a living wage for the ordinary citizen, and this is true even in a historically progressive state like Tamil Nadu.

Share of various food and non-food item groups in total expenditure: All-India. Source: PIB, government of India, January 2025.

Notably, our facility is not dependent on migrant workers from the northern states, whose costs are even lower. Except for a couple of staff members, the workers here are local Tamils. The working class in Tamil Nadu generally enjoys a higher floor of dignity and far better health outcomes than their counterparts in many northern states. Yet, underneath this welfare cushion lies the exact same structural inequality found across the rest of India. Even India’s best-performing state models have failed to address the core issue – an economic system meticulously engineered to keep working people at barely subsistence level.

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