India is home to the largest middle class in the world. It is also the country with the largest number of the world's poor (over 600 million), where 290 million people can neither read nor write, and a child dies every three minutes of something as easily curable as diarrhoea. These are statistics that most middle-class Indians prefer to ignore, especially in post-liberalization India. In this first-of-its-kind book, Pavan K Varma author of the best-selling The Great Indian Middle Class, teams up with journalist Renuka Khandekar to show us how ruinous this apathy is and how the middle class shoudl engage in the process of national development.