The Economics Panel at VLF – Vadodara Literature Festival 4.0, held in Chanakya’s Courtyard on January 27, 2026, opened with a statistic that reframed every subsequent exchange: according to the World Inequality Report 2026, India’s top 10% of earners capture 58% of total national income. The bottom 50% – five hundred million people – collectively hold 15%.
Pradeep Mehta, founder of CUTS International and a global pioneer in consumer protection and competition policy, brought the number to the session not as a polemic but as an analytical starting point. Devina Mehra, founder and chief investment officer of First Global and author of Money, Myths and Mantras, treated it as an investment lens – a fact that determines where capital flows, where it doesn’t, and what happens to people who are not in the economic conversation at all. Nitin Seth, CEO of Incedo and author of Human Edge in the AI Age, read it as a warning about what automation is about to do to the distribution problem if it is not actively addressed.
Together, the three constituted a panel that approached India’s economic moment from three genuinely different vantage points – consumer protection, capital markets, and technology – and found, in the overlap, a set of conclusions that were more uncomfortable than the standard growth narrative tends to produce.
Har Ghar Vyapar: The Vision and Its Gaps
Devina Mehra on the Myths That Make People Poor
Devina Mehra’s contribution to the session was organised around a series of myths – widely held beliefs about money, markets, and investment that are not only wrong but actively harmful to the financial lives of the people who hold them.
The most striking data point she shared: 95% of market traders lose money. Not because the market is rigged, though regulation can always be improved. Because the way most people approach trading – emotionally, reactively, on the basis of social media tips and influencer advice – is a reliable mechanism for transferring wealth from retail participants to institutional ones. The market does not care about your conviction. It responds to information, liquidity, and the decisions of millions of participants, most of whom are better resourced and faster than the individual acting on a YouTube recommendation.
She was direct about cryptocurrency specifically: the combination of extreme volatility, limited regulatory oversight, and a social media ecosystem that profits from the enthusiasm of new participants creates a financial instrument that is more likely to destroy the savings of its newest participants than to generate the wealth they were promised. Her position was not ideological – she is not opposed to new financial instruments. It was empirical: the evidence of what actually happens to retail cryptocurrency participants, in aggregate, is not consistent with the narrative that is used to recruit them.
Her money myths that every young person should interrogate:
- ‘The market always goes up eventually’ – true over decades, cold comfort if you need the money in three years
- ‘This expert/influencer knows something the market doesn’t’ – 95% of traders lose money; the odds are not in your favour
- ‘SIPs are boring’ – the boring mechanism of systematic investment over time is the one with the best evidence
- ‘Crypto will make me rich’ – the evidence of what happens to retail participants, in aggregate, is not the testimonials you see online
- ‘I’ll start investing when I have more money’ – compounding is time-dependent; starting late is the most expensive mistake
Nitin Seth on AI, Employment, and the 35–50% Question
Nitin Seth’s contribution arrived at the session’s most forward-looking and, for students planning careers, most immediately consequential territory: what artificial intelligence is going to do to employment, and what ‘the human edge’ actually means in a labour market that is changing faster than any previous technological transition.
The estimate he placed before the audience – 35–50% of current jobs are susceptible to significant automation disruption over the next decade – is consistent with the range of serious forecasts from research institutions. It is also, in the Indian context, a number with specific implications. An economy that is already struggling to absorb the employment needs of a growing young population, dealing with significant inequality in the distribution of growth, is being asked to navigate a technological transition that will structurally alter the kinds of work available.
His POSSIBLE framework for navigating this transition – named for the attributes of Purpose, Optimism, Strength, Self-awareness, Integrity, Belonging, Learning, and Excellence – was less a list of virtues than a description of the qualities that make a human worker genuinely difficult to replace. The jobs that resist automation are not primarily technical jobs. They are jobs that require authentic human connection, contextual judgment, ethical reasoning, creative problem-solving in novel situations, and the ability to build trust with other humans. These are, notably, the qualities that the Indian education system is least good at developing – and the ones that are most worth developing now.
Key Takeaway - The Financial Literacy Gap and Who Is Paying for It
The session’s final theme was the gap between the financial information available to young Indians and the financial literacy – the understanding of how to evaluate and use that information – they actually possess.
Social media has democratised access to financial content. It has simultaneously created a content ecosystem in which the most engaging financial advice is almost always the most dangerous: the overnight success story, the get-rich-quick scheme, the certainty that is purchased by simplifying away all the complexity that would make the advice less shareable. The student who gets their financial education from Instagram reels is not better informed than the student who received no financial education at all. They are differently misinformed, in ways that may be harder to correct because they are not experienced as ignorance but as knowledge.
All three panellists converged, in their closing statements, on the same prescription: learn the basics of money before you earn it, not after. Understand the difference between an asset and a liability. Understand what compounding requires from you in terms of time. Understand what diversification means and why it works. These are not sophisticated ideas. They are accessible to any student who takes them seriously. The penalty for not taking them seriously is paid over decades – quietly, in the gap between the wealth you could have built and the wealth you actually did.
