How India Earns, Spends and Saves

I came across and interesting survey jointly conducted by Max New York Life and National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) - ‘How India Earns, Spends and Saves’ - that throws some light on what Indians are doing with their money.

Here are some of the highlights of the survey

• 81% of Indians save; the average household savings are Rs. 16,139.
• The top income-quintile saves 44% of income
• Graduate households save 30% of income; non-graduate families an average of 18%
• Salaried earners save around 7% of income; labourer households save about 4%
• Less than 25 per cent of households have life insurance. 78 per cent of the households are aware of life insurance, only 24 per cent households own a life insurance policy
• Indian households keep 65 per cent of their savings in liquid assets like bank or post office deposits and cash at home, invest 23 per cent in physical investments like real estate and gold and only 12 per cent in financial instruments. Life insurance is among the most popular financial instruments.
• 36% of savings are kept as cash at home, 50% in banks, 5% in post office accounts and 3% in cooperative societies.
• 58% labourers and 20% salary earners said that their first choice for depositing savings would be to keep it at home.
• 96 per cent of the households cannot survive beyond a year on their current savings.

The Survey covered 342 towns and almost 2,000 villages across 250 districts and 2,255 wards. The sample size included 63,016 households, equally divided between rural and urban areas.