The Wage Watch

The missing variable.

₹41 lakh crore of new money either becomes GDP or becomes prices, and the tell is not "are wages rising." It is the reservation wage — the raise below which your people start sending out CVs, adjusted for productivity. Nobody measures it. The RBI surveys households who don't follow the question; IIM-Ahmedabad asks informed people for a forecast, and informed people just repeat the current print. You are the only ones who actually know. Two minutes. Anonymous — no name, no email, no account id stored, ever.

Exhibit A — the note whose purchasing power this survey is tracking.

What are you seeing on the ground?

Your vantage point

Sector you see most closely

Where

Pay band of the people you are describing

The floor behaves differently by band — above ₹10 lakh a 6% hike reads as a pay cut against school fees; below it, it bites harder. Pick the band your answers below are about.

Wages at the lower end — helpers, drivers, guards, entry-level, contract staff — over the last 6 months

The last actual hike those people got

What was paid, not what was asked. The gap between this and the walk-away number below is the pressure reading.

The one that matters — the walk-away number

Below what annual raise do your people start looking elsewhere? Not what they ask for. The floor at which they actually go.

Is that threshold higher than it was a year ago?

A rising floor is the start of the chain — expectations first, then prices.

Last hike vs productivity

Did output per person rise enough to pay for it? A raise earned by productivity is not inflation — the same raise without it is.

Where a hike was skipped or thin, did attrition follow?

Vendors / contractors quoting higher than last year?

Everyday prices you personally pay — groceries, rent, eating out, help at home

The line item that bites hardest right now

The walk-away number is priced against a basket — and the basket is not the CPI's. Which item is doing the pushing?

You are (optional — there is early evidence that women read inflation differently; we want to test it, not assume it)

One concrete observation, if you have it (optional — a number beats an adjective: "site PM on ₹25–30k walked over a 6% offer")

Nothing identifying is stored — not your name, email, sign-in or account id. One report per month per browser is the honour system.

Send me the findings. Ticking this puts your sign-in email on a separate mailing list that is stored on its own — it is never written next to your answers, and cannot be joined back to them. Untick and nothing about you is kept at all.

Why this exists. If the past year's money growth meets idle capacity it becomes output; if it meets a rising wage floor it becomes inflation, durably, because expectations move and then prices follow. We want to understand whether your reservation wage has gone up without any increase in productivity. If we can identify it before it starts, we will be doing great service to the policymakers, our companies, and our clients. And if we can create a group and launch something, this will be tracked by markets — imagine if it starts influencing bond prices tomorrow. The full session notes carry the argument; this page is the instrument.