Update: Read full transcript here.

The past few years have seen much hype regarding the economic progress in India, much of it extolling the country’s “rising incomes” and “exploding” middle class. Entrepreneurs in the country seem to have believed this, resulting in an overbuilding of glitzy malls and the rapid expansion of the number of domestic airlines. Although there has been definite economic progress in India, who exactly benefits?

The number of people living in poverty is often ignored. India’s official poverty measure has long been this: People below the poverty line have a daily diet of less than 2,400 kilocalories in rural areas and less than 2,100 kilocalories in urban areas.

What do measures of wealth such as “middle class” and “poverty” mean in India, compared to countries such as the United States or those in Europe? Estimates of the number of people in poverty in the country vary wildly, as Carl Haub wrote in a 2010 PRB web article with co-author O.P. Sharma, and even the slightest changes in the definition of poverty can change the number of the poor in India by millions. India is on track to become the world’s largest country about 10 years from now, despite declining fertility. How will it manage the population growth in its very large and very poor states?

In a PRB Discuss Online, Carl Haub, senior demographer at PRB, answers questions from participants about what “poverty” and “middle class” in India really mean as standards of living, and what implications these may have for India’s economic and demographic future.