'The salary dream is dead': Market guru Saurabh Mukherjea drops truth bomb on India's middle class

The steady, white-collar job—once the cornerstone of India's middle class—is vanishing. And we’ve barely started to talk about it.

Saurabh Mukherjea, founder and chief investment officer of Marcellus Investment Managers, believes that India is now entering a new economic era. In a sharply worded podcast appearance titled Beyond the Paycheck: India’s Entrepreneurial Rebirth, he argued that the very idea of salaried employment as a stable and rewarding path is slowly disintegrating.

“I think the defining flavour of this decade will be effectively the death of salaried employment, the gradual demise of salary employment as a worthwhile avenue for educated, determined, hardworking people,” said Mukherjea.

This isn’t just a theory. It’s a warning grounded in evidence.

AI is coming for the office
Mukherjea pointed to large-scale technological shifts reshaping the job market. In sector after sector—IT, media, finance—the roles that once needed thousands of workers are increasingly automated.

“Much of what was supposed to be done by white-collar workers is now done by AI. Google says a third of its coding is already done by AI. The same is coming for Indian IT, media, and finance,” he said.

And it’s not just entry-level roles. Middle management—the layer that once offered job security, authority, and long-term growth—is crumbling too.

“The old model where our parents worked 30 years for one organisation is dying. The job construct that built India’s middle class is no longer sustainable.”

For the millions of educated Indians who grew up believing in the promise of the corporate ladder, the implications are profound. The ground beneath them is shifting—and fast.

Entrepreneurship: A new hope
But Mukherjea isn’t pessimistic. Far from it.

He sees a once-in-a-generation opportunity in the rubble of the old order. The rise of digital infrastructure—what the government dubs the JAM Trinity (Jandhan, Aadhaar, and Mobile)—has created the tools needed for a wave of new entrepreneurs to emerge.

“If applied with the same intellect and grit we brought to corporate careers, entrepreneurship can be the new engine of prosperity,” he said.

The JAM framework has given millions of low-income Indians access to banking, identification, and information—all crucial building blocks for doing business in the digital age. Where earlier generations sought out jobs in multinational corporations, today’s youth could create their own path.

That is, if society lets them.

Breaking up with stability
Mukherjea believes India's obsession with salaries and social prestige is holding it back.

“We’re a money-obsessed society. We define success by paychecks. That has to change,” he said. “We should be solving for happiness and impact—not just monthly income.”

The message is clear: clinging to outdated definitions of success will only lead to frustration, especially in a world where the jobs themselves may not exist.

What’s needed is a cultural reset—one that begins at home.

“Families like yours and mine must stop preparing kids to be job-seekers. The jobs won’t be there,” Mukherjea said.

It’s a hard truth. But perhaps a liberating one, too.

From paychecks to purpose
Mukherjea’s vision is not a utopian fantasy, nor a technocratic blueprint. It’s a call for imagination—and courage. The kind of imagination it takes to unlearn what we’ve been told about success. The courage to build, not just follow.

As AI remakes the economy, the middle-class dream will need to be rewritten. That rewrite, Mukherjea suggests, won’t be led by HR departments or job consultancies—but by risk-takers, creators, and first-time founders.

The age of the salaryman, as he bluntly puts it, is over. What comes next is up to us.