AS the owner of one of India’s best-known advertising agencies, Suhel Seth has little time for the values of frugality and asceticism once embraced by his country’s middle class. He drives a Porsche sports car, wears well-cut suits and enjoys expensive air travel.

“People used to ask me why I flew the Concorde and I’d say, for the simple reason that it’s an indulgence,” said Seth, 42, who also writes newspaper columns that celebrate India’s emerging consumer culture. “I’m not going to feel remorseful every time I pass a shanty or sob every time I see a rickshaw- wallah.

“This country used to have a strange mindset that refused to recognise that living the good life was a fundamental right. We mustn’t be hemmed in by a society that believes you cannot live well because other people are poor.”

Seth is at the vanguard of a consumer boom that is transforming the world’s largest democracy. Indians are turning their back on the values of self-denial embodied by Mahatma Gandhi, who led the nation to independence in 1947, and embracing western-style consumerism with gusto.

“Average living standards are 70% higher than in 1991,” said Shankar Acharya, a prominent economist. Almost 100m households now have incomes of £2,500-£12,000 a year — making them middle class in Indian terms — up from just 15m in 1991.

The ranks of the “super-rich” are growing almost as fast: the number of families with annual incomes of more than £125,000 has more than doubled in the past five years from 20,000 to 53,000.

Members of the “post-liberalisation” generation, now in their twenties and thirties, have no experience of the grey years of protectionism that lasted from independence until the beginning of the 1990s, when India began to open up its economy.

As recently as the 1980s, a new car — almost invariably an Indian-made Ambassador or Maruti — used to be such a momentous purchase that families would take it to the local temple to be blessed and decorate it with net curtains.

Shops used to stock only one brand of toothpaste, while buying anything on credit was seen as a sign of moral laxity. Now there are dozens of brands of everything and developers cannot build malls fast enough to keep pace with frenzied shoppers.

Drive after dark from Delhi to Gurgaon and the skyline is lit up by huge brand logos — Benetton, Nike, Reebok, Lacoste, McDonald’s — glittering in neon on retail malls and plazas.

Gurgaon alone has six shopping malls, out of an estimated 25 or so in the country. There are predicted to be 400 by 2008.

Purveyors of luxury goods are treating the Indian market with a new seriousness. Bulgari, Cartier, Hugo Boss, Canali, Bentley, Audi and Porsche have opened branches in the past two years. Last month they were joined by Chanel.

At the Louis Vuitton outlet in the Oberoi hotel in Delhi, expensively dressed young women examine handbags on sale for amounts that could feed a poor family for five years.

“It’s so much easier now. I used to go to Paris and London and do my shopping there, but now I can pick up what I want here,” said Nidhi Kochar, 32, as she bought a £900 handbag.

Even those forced to survive on a few pounds a week — the majority of India’s 1 billion people — aspire to better things. When old clothes were donated to tsunami victims in southern India, many fishermen were disgusted. “Our young boys wear jeans and nice shirts these days,” said one. “They’re not going to wear these old things.”

To some Indians, this new consumerism appears to be a break with a more spiritual past. Nirmala Deshpande, an MP and president of a charity set up by Gandhi, dismisses it as a temporary phase.

“Let them experiment but they will realise that this consumerism won’t buy them happiness or peace of mind,” Deshpande said. “Look at stress in society. Look at how people are turning to yoga, vegetarianism and naturopathy, something that Gandhi strongly believed in. In the end, they will have to come back to his values.”

Retailers disagree — not least because demographics are on their side. About half of all Indians are aged under 25 and many opt for Mammon rather than Mahatma.

Akash Premsen, 23, a marketing executive, is already on his second car and has a laptop and an expensive mobile phone.

“India is so diverse that on the roads you’re going to see a bullock cart, a bicycle and a BMW 7-series,” he said. “It was the same during the industrial revolution in the West. You had massive inequality. We’re developing fast and so we’re no different.

“Gandhi lived in a different world. If he were alive now, he’d probably say there was nothing wrong with materialism but you had to get the balance right.”

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