Two-year-old Ishan is too young to remember the extravagant party his parents threw to celebrate his second birthday, but the hungry young beggars outside the tall wrought-iron gates of their Delhi farmhouse will never forget it.

Ishan was dressed in his favourite Noddy outfit to match the theme and to welcome his 100 guests to a party that had set his parents back £4,500.

The guests would barely have noticed the traffic light beggars pleading for coins as they drove their 4x4s through Delhi’s exclusive Chattarpur suburb.

They were taking part in a ritual that is becoming a booming business among the city’s elite: the big fat Indian kids’ birthday party is now starting to rival the country’s all-consuming wedding industry. According to industry insiders, it is now worth around £10m a year in Delhi alone, and it is growing fast.

Driving the phenomenon is a ruthless competitiveness among India’s largely Hindu upper-middle classes, whose wealth has grown enormously over the past 15 years.

As their fortunes have soared, their children’s weddings, and now birthdays, have become opportunities to display their new riches and social contacts. At little Ishan’s party, no detail was overlooked in his parents’ campaign to impress their friends and acquaintances.

The guests arrived through a specially commissioned Noddy gateway (£300), onto the sweeping lawns and swimming pool of their mansion. There were 20,000 balloons in Noddy’s colours, and thousands more bearing his face and name, costing £750. There were 40 Noddy car models and statuettes dotted around the garden (£150), and four specially built Noddy bars for popcorn, chocolates and sweets (£150). A Noddy clown wandered among the children as they toyed with their Noddy-car goodie bags (100 at £12.50 each – £1,250).

And then there were the fairground rides: A “Columbus” swinging ship, three 40ft bouncy castles, a merry-go-round and a mini-train ride. The games and rides alone cost another £1,100.

There was a running buffet of pizza, burgers and sandwiches, all laid out on tables with matching Noddy glasses, napkins and plates.

The family could have laid on elephants at £25 each for garden rides (a herd is kept by the banks of Delhi’s Yamuna River, and hired out for events), or camels at £15 per beast, but these animals are increasingly seen as the passé preserve of lower-scale parties, according to one party planner. “One Indian family last month asked me to lay on live lions and tigers,” he said.

Rakesh Gupta, of the Gift Palace toy and party store in Delhi’s exclusive Khan Market, said over the past 15 years, his party business has grown to at least 60 a month, more than 40 of which are staged at five-star hotels, and cost up to £5,000.

“In the early days it was a family affair, but now children’s parties are more of a social gathering, more like business parties,” he said. Of the 100 or so guests attending most birthday parties, 60 will be business contacts of the parents.

The competitiveness of Delhi’s new rich is not limited to the scale of the parties they throw, the social standing of the guests or the choice of exotic rides. It also extends to the goodie bags for guests to take home. According to Gupta, these now include expensive electronic toys such as Xbox game consoles, iPod nanos and Game Boy Advance pocket computer games.

As Ishan’s guests boarded their Land Cruisers, they passed the Chattarpur Mandir temple complex, where barely dressed children as young as six paint their faces, sport Hanuman mon-key-god tails and tap on the tinted windows, begging for small change.

According to Pavan K Varma of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, the discrepancy in wealth will have passed the party-goers by.

“There is a new class in India with more money than ever before. There’s no reticence among them about flaunting it. It’s glaring in terms of the unacceptable poverty still around us,” he said.

“The more invitation cards we send, the more our status and that of our children is assured. It’s about hierarchy. The point isn’t to celebrate a birthday, but for people to know how you celebrated it.”

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