The pot belly is not prosperity. It’s price signal we ignore!

In Nagesh Kukunoor’s nearly three-decade-old cult classic Hyderabad Blues, there is a fleeting moment that still stings with a sharp, contemporary truth. Looking at the soft swell of his childhood friend’s waistline, the film’s repatriated protagonist asks what happened. The friend’s grinning, self-satisfied response—“This is prosperity, man”—perfectly encapsulated a familiar social truth we have yet to outgrow. In an era of scarcity, a soft belly wasn’t a health risk—it was a luxury. The protruding stomach became the ultimate status symbol of middle-class success.

But somewhere along the way, the joke stopped being funny.
Today, that same belly appears ubiquitous: on the affluent executive in Gurugram, the delivery worker in Patna, the government clerk in Lucknow, the shopkeeper in Surat, and increasingly, even among children in the city. However, obesity is no longer disease of privilege. They are now structural features of modern economic life. Medical science is unequivocal on this point. Obesity is not merely a cosmetic issue or a lifestyle quirk; it is now widely recognised as a chronic disease that significantly raises the risk of cardiovascular illness, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, stroke, and several forms of cancer. What was once jokingly celebrated as “healthy prosperity” has quietly mutated into a definitive public health emergency.

And that is precisely where economics enters the story. The expanding waistline is not primarily a story about weak willpower. It is a story about incentives.

The first great shift was the collapse in the price of calories. Since the Green Revolution and the era of trade liberalisation, the real cost of food energy—especially sugar, refined carbohydrates, edible oils, and ultra-processed snacks—has plummeted. Never in human history have dense calories been so cheap and so accessible.

For the poor, this was initially emancipatory. Cheap calories meant fewer hungry nights. For the middle class, it meant convenience. For the rich, it meant endless abundance.

But economics has a ruthless logic: people consume more of what becomes cheaper. When a plate of Samosa Chaat costs less than a bowl of fruit, the market is quietly telling our body to grow larger. The expanding belly is not irrational behaviour; it is a rational response to distorted prices.

The second shift was the rising price of time.

Most modern work, paired with screen-bound relaxation, extracts physical movement from daily life. We migrate from offices and call centers straight to vehicles and couches, always anchored to a screen. As labour has become purely cognitive, physical activity has turned into an option—and an expensive one at that.

An hour spent exercising is an hour not spent earning, caregiving, commuting, or resting. For a working parent already stretched thin, fast food and sedentary convenience are often entirely rational trade-offs. Economists call this opportunity cost. The pot belly is, in many ways, the visible shadow of a time-starved economy.

Then comes the deeper behavioural problem: human beings systematically discount the future.

The pleasure of a samosa or pakoda is immediate and tangible. The diabetic complications twenty years later are abstract and distant. The same logic applies to the environment. The groundwater depletion needed to grow feed crops, the methane emissions from industrial meat production, the forests cleared for agriculture—these consequences are temporally and geographically remote. In everyday decision-making, they are discounted almost to zero. This isn’t a collective moral failure; rather, as the Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker illustrated, it is rational behavior driven by high time preference. Humans are simply wired to heavily favor present rewards over future costs.

Which brings us to the real scandal: the missing market for externalities.

When someone consumes an extra 500 calories of ultra-processed food, they pay for the snack—but not for the ecological damage embedded inside it. They do not pay for depleted aquifers, carbon emissions, plastic waste, or the destruction of forests. Those costs are externalised onto society, onto future generations, and onto the planet itself.

The obese individual, therefore, is not some moral failure. He is merely responding to prices that systematically hide the true cost of consumption. This is not a failure of character. It is a failure of markets.

And once we see obesity through that lens, the entire public debate changes.

This is where empty moralizing fails. Telling people to “have more discipline” or to “eat less and move more” is economically blind to how the modern world is engineered. If we want a healthier society, we must alter the financial incentives. We need Pigouvian tools: taxing food miles, levying feed crops, or adding calorie surcharges. Beyond taxation, we need urban planning that prioritizes pedestrian life, lowering the cost of physical activity. If health insurance systems started rewarding preventive habits, they would effectively force us to account for tomorrow’s chronic illness today.

In other words, healthier societies require better incentive engineering, not better sermons.

The friend in Hyderabad Blues was not wrong to associate his belly with prosperity. In the India of the 1990s, cheap calories represented liberation from deprivation. But prosperity evolves. What once signalled abundance now signals imbalance.

A society drowning in excess cannot continue calling itself successful merely because its shelves are full. The pot belly is not violence in the dramatic sense of fists or conflict. It is violence in the quieter economic sense: a slow-moving, rational, predictable tragedy produced by distorted prices and deferred costs. It is the physical manifestation of an ecological bill that nobody wants to pay today.

And like all unpaid debts, the interest compounds.

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