The Indian middle class was promised a trajectory. That promise has been broken.

For three decades after the 1991 reforms, a simple bargain held India together: study hard, get a degree, find a white-collar job, and your life would steadily improve. Today, that bargain lies in ruins. White-collar job creation has collapsed to near zero. The cost of a middle-class life doubles every eight years while salaries crawl. Household debt has surpassed the levels of the United States and China. And across the economy—from glass IT campuses to the rain-soaked streets where delivery agents ride—a toxic work culture extracts ever more from anxious, atomised workers who have no voice and no safety net.

The Unmaking of the Indian Dream is the first book to weave these threads into a single, gripping narrative. It traces the forces hollowing out India’s productive core: automation and AI eliminating the jobs degrees were meant to guarantee; an education pipeline that produces millions of unemployable graduates; a legal system that offers no shelter to the white-collar employee or the gig worker; a political calculus that taxes the middle class and ignores it; and a workplace culture that glorifies overwork and tolerates abuse.

Through the stories of composite characters—a young engineer who vaporises his family’s savings on the stock market, a delivery agent trapped in debt, a call-centre worker managed by an algorithm, a middle manager crushed between a toxic boss and a team she cannot protect—the book brings macroeconomic data to life. It is literary non-fiction in the tradition of the best explanatory journalism: rigorous, human, and urgent.

At a time when India’s headlines celebrate GDP growth, The Unmaking of the Indian Dream looks beneath the numbers to ask the uncomfortable question: can a republic survive when the class that built it is slowly coming apart?

Written for the general reader, the business leader, and the policymaker alike, this book is both a diagnosis and a plea. It does not offer easy solutions, but it insists that a different future is possible—if we are willing to see the crisis clearly, and to act.

This book is published free of charge as a public contribution to an urgent national conversation.