In 1985, Franco Modigliani won the Nobel Prize for his life-cycle hypothesis of household savings. The graph shows diverging paths as the working-age share keeps rising while household savings fall. By Modigliani’s logic, household savings should be rising in step. This has caused net financial savings to decline, leaving households increasingly dependent on borrowing to sustain consumption. Household savings have long been India’s primary source of domestic capital, financing investments in infrastructure businesses, and industrial expansion.